More Than Mauve

Deeper into my theme now of biographies of scientists with Mauve by Simon Garfield, about the discoveries of William Perkins.  At age 18, Perkins, experimenting with coal tar looking to make quinine in the lab, discovered the first of chemical based colors, "inventing mauve."  (This review should be read along with the next one on the discoveries of William Smith, both English men disdained by both the aristocrats and university employed chemists.  Both Perkins and Smith's treatment is reminiscent of Rosalind Franklin's.)

While experimenting with chemist August Hoffman in 1865, he noticed that the "slag" at the bottom of equipment had a strange interesting color, the first aniline dye.  Fifty years later, there were over two thousand artificial colors.  Today, industry uses petroleum as the ready source of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.  This is organic chemistry, the science of carbon-compounds.

As Perkins explained what happened, "I was endeavouring to convert an artificial base into the natural alkaloid quinine, but my experiment instead of yielding the colorless quinine, gave a reddish powder ... when digested with spirits of wine gave the mauve dye."  (Or as the Victorians said, "morve."  Others belittled the chance find, and most of the book then goes on to trace the gulf between pure and applied science, as Perkins himself jumped to the production of dyes rather than stay full time in the laboratory, opening his own factory.

Besides being a life line of Perkins' life's ups and downs, it reprises the factors on the industry and its migration to Germany, the effect of British patent complexities, fashion, accolades and fetes and final near ignorance of this man's contributions to organic chemistry's boon to medicine and every day life products.

Why again am I surprised that the books I choose under a particular theme keep intertwining?  Franklin has similar life experience as Perkins, Perkins in turn parallels William Smith's ventures; but oddly enough, this books makes me want to reread one of the books I know leave within easy reach, The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, which on page 169, gives a short and sweet summary of Perkins' discovery and the rise and fall of this color which became associated with mourning and menopausal women.  So out of fashion, almost to the nth degree, behooves me to strip wallpaper from two rooms upstairs.