It was a mixture of text and cartoons, and there were about 20 examples of inventions that have come about by chance.” Among them was the brilliant byproduct of coal tar found by William Perkin, and called mauve – a French name for the like-coloured mallow plant. “Maybe three years ago he was reading a book, called Chemical Chaos. “I’ve got a 13-year-old son,” Garfield explained over the telephone from his London home. Garfield’s fifth book was undertaken, as many worthy projects have been, by happy accident. For elucidation of these curiosities there is no better volume than Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World. Perkin’s discovery also initiated the betrothal, however stormy it has since become, of science and industry. It overturned the prevailing belief, shared by Perkin’s own father, that the science of chemistry was not especially useful, let alone lucrative. In 1856 he had accidentally invented the first artificial colour, which happened to be beautiful, and, as it turned out, widely consequential. Jonathan Kiefer talks to Simon Garfield about the secret history of chemistry revealed in his book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the Worldįor the subject of his most recent and most popular book, Simon Garfield chose a man whose funeral was fastidiously reported in the periodical “Gas World,” and whose birthplace was suggested as a point of pilgrimage by “The Dyer, Textile Printer, Bleacher and Finisher.” The man was Sir William Perkin, an alchemist’s grandson.
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