Mauve by Simon Garfield

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This is the sort of nerdy book I might have read randomly, but I probably wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t already read and enjoyed Simon Garfield. You can read my posts about Just My Type, On the Map, and Timekeepers if you like. 

 

While each of the other books is different from each other, they are more alike than they are like this book. Published in 2000, it belongs to his earlier period, when he wrote more standard non-fiction, rather than his later collections of interesting stories related to the topic. In this book, therefore, he tells a pretty straightforward story of William Perkin, the chemist who discovered (or better yet created) the first artificial dye. 

This means that this book was informative, interesting, and full of relevant facts. But it wasn’t quite as much fun as the other three, which were more freewheeling and random. No diss to Garfield, whose writing is good, but just a bit different than the other books. 

 

Perkin is, unfortunately, not much celebrated or even remembered by the general public these days. Perhaps this is because dyes are everywhere to the degree that we don’t even remember when color was a luxury in clothing and printing. 

 

He also didn’t have an outsized personality or a portfolio of pithy quotes. He was mostly a meticulous chemist, who took an accidentally creation and followed it to its development into a commercial success.

 

Perkin originally set out to create an artificial version of quinine. His goal was humanitarian: malaria was still costing millions of lives, but the biological source of its treatment was limited and slow growing. If he could create it in a lab, its cost would go down and its availability go up. 

 

Instead, one of his experiments led to a brilliantly purplish substance that stained his fingers. He decided to see if he could turn it into a functional dye, which he called “mauve.” That was the first color created in a laboratory, but soon Perkin and others were creating new colors one after the other. 

 

An industry was born, but more than that, the lessons learned led to even greater discoveries. Within a century after his death, his chemicals had led to “enormous advances in medicine, perfumery, food, explosives, and photography.” 

 

And yet he remains relatively unknown. 

 

His life was a bit mundane, I suppose, which is why the book isn’t as exciting as some stories. Perkin got together some partners and started a dye works. Later, when he needed to either invest a lot more in it, or find investors, in order to expand, he chose to sell and go back to research. 

 

So, while some “pure” chemists considered him a sellout for going commercial, he never really cashed in. He lacked the full capitalist instinct. 

 

While he and his staff did create more dyes, he never did get his medical breakthrough. 

 

He married and had kids, and bought a nice place with his profits. He taught and lectured and did typical scientist stuff. He was a devout evangelical (in the good, British, way, not the toxic American way) and spent a portion of his profits bettering the lives of factory workers and other low wage workers in his town. 

 

Amusingly, the main source of friction appeared to be that Perkin was a teetotaler, while the workers liked their pint after work. But this was mild, and Perkin was generally liked by all. 

 

The second half of the book is less about Perkin’s life than the subsequent history of dyes and the industry he founded. Most of the production moved to Germany in the late 1800s, leading to a crisis when World War One broke out. Now, China and India dominate production. 

 

Dyes also came to be used extensively in medicine, both as a diagnostic - selective staining is discussed at length - and as a treatment - it appears that some dyes have significant therapeutic effect against certain diseases. 

 

One of the coolest things in this section was that methyl violet and methyl violet literally stain different things different colors. The chemical reaction changes the color. (I got to see some of this in action decades ago when my wife took me along on a school field trip to the VA microbiology lab.) 

 

So, interesting stuff. I learned a lot I didn’t know before. 

 

One of those is the name. The color itself had been named previously, but it didn’t really make it into the vernacular until Perkin marketed his dye. The name itself comes from the French name for the common mallow, whose flower can be mauve (and similar shades.) Chances are, you have a member of the mallow family growing as a weed near your house - they are not native to the Americas, and are considered an invasive pest. 

 

There are a lot of other interesting plants - and animals - in the book. Garfield explores the topic of natural dyes, and their competition with the synthetic ones. For example, woad, which is a relative of mustard, with similar brilliant yellow flowers. It is used, however, to make indigo dye. Who knew?

 

Each chapter starts with a quote from somewhere, about something related to mauve. These are pretty cool, and also sometimes unexpected. 

 

For example, this 1999 memo from Buckingham Palace which the Evening Standard got a hold of. The queen was apparently a bit picky about her hotel accomodations, which the rag got to snark on about a bit. 

 

“She doesn’t want the management to think she’s fussy, you understand, but could they please make sure that any flower arrangements do not contain anything mauve (or carnations of any color)...”

 

I’m rather fond of carnations myself, although I have found them more difficult to grow than roses. 

 

And, naturally, we get a snarky Oscar Wilde quote, from The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

 

“Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.” 

 

The chapter about World War One was interesting. For example, did you know that one military advantage Germany had was that its extensive dye works could quickly switch to producing explosives, because many of the raw materials were the same? 

 

But it wasn’t just materials and factories the British lacked: they also lacked trained chemists. Why? Because their school system failed to produce them. And a significant reason for that was that the government didn’t encourage the study, and the universities saw industry as the enemy, while industry didn’t build ties to the universities. 

 

Some of this sounds familiar today. The US lost its edge in producing scientists, in significant part because after desegregation, public schools have been starved of funds (in many states) and targeted as supposed factories for “wokeness.” Also, the inequality and racist systems in the US have made it more difficult for potential scientists from lower income and minority communities to aspire to that career. (And ditto for women - and Trump is not helping that.) When you limit your field, you miss out on candidates. 

 

(That’s literally what DEI is about, by the way: making sure we do not overlook brilliant people because they have the “wrong” color or gender.) 

 

Garfield also notes another reason for the lack of nourishment of the sciences: a belief in the “great genius” theory of how science progresses. This is a problem here in the US too - the reason people think Elon Musk actually invented anything rather than buying it. 

 

In reality, discovery is the result of many hours of work - increasingly collaborative, industrialized work. And that goes for all sciences. 

 

This was a root problem in Britain’s surrender of its dye industry to Germany. As Garfield puts it, the reasoning of the Secretary of War was that institutional support wasn’t needed, because genius will find its way without need for assistance. 

 

This too is a factor in the decline of the sciences in the US. And why we end up having to hire immigrant engineers to fill the gaps. (Not that immigration is a bad thing. Far from it! But we could also have more native-born scientists and STEM workers generally with more consistent institutional support.)

 

I’ll end with a couple of humorous bits. 

 

An early plastic, Lactoid, was discovered by accident when the chemist’s cat knocked a beaker of formaldehyde over into its own milk saucer. Cats gonna cat, I tell you. 

 

The other is in a passage in the Author’s Note at the end. Garfield lists a bunch of modern authors of an era of British literature (including Julian Barnes), who all seemed to have some sort of a dare, a bet perhaps, where they all worked “mauve” into the first chapter of their books. There are quotes, too. Including this one from John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. 

 

“[S]uggested that either the artis was a tragicomically inept doctrinaire cubist, or that Mr. R. B. Fenner-Crossway, MA was in reality a dyspeptic pattern of mauve rhomboids.” 

 

That’s great stuff. It also is just a glimpse of how Garfield would later write, focusing more on the crazy stories like that, and less on serious biography. But don’t miss out on this book. The history of synthetic chemicals literally starts with dyes, and the early days are important to a full understanding of how we got to our modern chemical world.