One of those inane questions that people put in their bios or answer on those time-wasting personality tests is "What is your favorite color?" I think this is really crazy because my answer can depend on the day or the hour. Sure, I have my default answer (green), but sometimes I might prefer blue or orange or black or even purple.
These days, we take for granted that we can get whatever color we want fairly easily. If I was feeling like orange, I could just drop by the nearest retailer and get an orange shirt. Before the Industrial Revolution, wild-colored shirts--let alone wild-colored anything else--was no easy matter. Colored dyes had originated from natural sources. Purple dyes were extracted from thousands of mollusks (either Murex brandaris or Murex trunculus) just to make one robe. Cochineal, a crimson dye, came from cactus insects--but 17,000 of them were required to make even a single ounce of dye.
So how did synthetic dyes develop? In Mauve, Simon Garfield tells the story of how color mass production began with an experimental mishap. During 1856, the eighteen-year-old William Perkin was performing some chemical experiments on coal tar in his London laboratory. He was attempting to find a way to synthesize quinine as a treatment for malaria. He failed in doing so, but he didn't just throw the resulting sludge away. This sludge--as other chemists might have quickly dismissed--became the basis for a purple dye.
Mauve became an instant hit and made Perkin a very rich man. Queen Victoria donned the color for special occasions and the fashionistas of the time obsessed over it. Mauve also lead to other coal tar-derived or aniline dyes which took fashion by storm. But this didn't mean that there weren't detractors. Critics detested the bright new colors calling them gaudy. And the synthetic dyes weren't all benign--early processes in making these colors involved arsenic acid for oxidation. The dyed clothing weren't so much of a problem as the pollution that the factories dumped on the surrounding countryside. Perkin's mentor, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, was at first against him going into industry--thinking that he was throwing away his academic promise in favor of crass profit.
Perkin's motive, however, was to find applications for work in chemistry. While he was involved in the dye industry--and even when he got out of it during his thirties--he continued doing research. But even though he never got recognized for his later research, such as his work with magnetic rotary power, Perkin is credited with taking the field of chemistry from the theoretical to the practical. Companies which had originally specialized in dyes soon branched out to perfumes, plastics, medicine, and even explosives.
I liked how Garfield manages to weave the history of the dye industry with the life of an overlooked late nineteenth century chemist. There were sections of the narrative which seemed incongruous to me--especially at the end of the chapters when the author jumps from telling Perkin's story to an interview he has with someone in the modern day. Sure, it's amusing to read about color experts who only wear black themselves claim that pumpkin or lime green will be in next spring, but what does that have to do with the story being told at that moment? It would have made a lot more sense if these snippets were delegated to the last chapter where an author would have more freedom to muse about where the industry is going today. But other than that, it's a nice little tale of how a modest chemist changed the world with a color.
