Customer Reviews

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Originally I was skeptical of a book about the origin of a color, but Mauve is so much more. It is the story of the creation of artificial colors, the industries that spawned from it, as well as birth of chemistry as a innovating science in the 19th century. The discoveries by William Perkins opened up what would be literally thousands of new colors over the years, as well as essential components of the perfume industry, flavorings industry and even the bleaching industry. Inspirational also because so much of this arose from literally castoff garbage - coal tar. In essence Perkins began a new wave of recycling. The heart of the story is less the discovery itself, but the ripples it set off that continue to today, leading to the "better living through chemistry." Yet it also spotlights one of the lamentably forgotten pioneers in science who through a combination of curiosity, determination, foresight and luck found value in others castoff. Though it is classified as a biography, it is more of a sweeping view of history - the actual materials on Perkin's life pre and post mauve are almost incidental to what was discovered. Garfield helps shed light on the color revolution and spotlights something that we today often take for granted. It was nice to walk away from a book and realized that I really learned something.

This book pushed so many of my buttons -- science history, painting, Victoriania, chains of coincidence and hidden causality -- that I had to love it. Best popular science book I've read in a while.

A diferent kind of reader might have been annoyed at the depth of detail, much of it trivia. I gobbled it up, though.

I received Mauve this Christmas and loved it. It's a hybrid of a book, a primer in science, Victoriana, fashion and color. It's not so much a biography of Sir William Perkin, the man on the cover, as a history of mauve since his invention (1850s) to the present. Simon Garfield made me believe that the whole world can be seen in terms of a particular color, and he weaves in some great historical detail to support his case.
Mauve was really the first artificial dye to be made, and became the toast of London and Paris once the Empress Eugenie found that it suited her crinolines like nothing else. After mauve, any artificial dye was possible, and the world really did change. Even if it isn't your color of choice, I recommended this book as a very interesting read.
(By the way, I'm not Pat Barker the British author!)

This title belongs in the class of Small Stories Puffed Into Smallish Books, along with "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and "The Professor and the Madman." All three are entertaining, but the effort to stretch New Yorker articles into publishable books wears a bit. Fortunately, Garfield's a good writer, so even if the book does indeed meander a bit the meanderings are worth reading.

In 1859 there was a real mania for the color mauve, because it had been invented only three years before. Of course the color had not truly been invented, but people then just started seeing lots of it because the process of dyeing using the color had been invented. The inventor, an Englishman named William Perkin, was someone who achieved a good deal of fame in his time, but is now largely forgotten. _Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World_ (W. W. Norton) by Simon Garfield aims to bring him back to our memories, and in a lucid and enjoyable way, manages just that.

Perkin's revolution was to use coal tar derivatives, which had been regarded as useless waste products, to make the first of the aniline dyes; textile dyes before Perkin's day came from "natural sources," and were expensive, unreliable, and subject to fading. Perkin was only eighteen years old when he was tinkering with chemicals, trying to make the antimalarial drug quinine artificially. Perkin was looking for the colorless quinine, but instead produced a reddish powder. It would perhaps have been a sensible decision to scrap what he was working on and try again, but Perkin possessed an admirable curiosity, and further purified the powder to discover the prettiest purple dye anyone had ever seen. Chemists made new colors all the time, so his fellows were horrified that he planned to abandon academic chemistry to go into business, but he decided to go with his entrepreneurial instincts. Garfield describes the grueling duties of the young man trying to make it in a commercial world about which he initially knew little. But mauve took off, becoming the fashionable color, and Perkin's fortune was secure.

Perkin was a modest man, whom Garfield obviously admires. When the fiftieth anniversary of mauve came around, he reluctantly accepted a knighthood. It was not for a color, nor for the other colors he invented, nor for the papers he continued to produce for the academic world (usually not about dyes). With the production of the first aniline dye, Garfield demonstrates in his engaging book, it was the start of chemistry anew; the progeny of Perkin's original reactions for fashion now play roles in less superficial arts of medicine, pharmacology, engineering, and more.

The title alone was a seller for me. "How one man invented a color that changed the World". And I think Garfield really does manage to show this. William Perkins experiments with Coal Tar not only managed to show a viable use for this waste product, but it is because of him we are now able to dress in bright, unfading colours - aniline dyes.

I found the first few chapters of this book the most interesting. I felt Garfield had a good story - showing Perkins role, his experiments, the difficulty finding someone to use the process, the expense of doing it and the competition from people also discovering the process. These first few chapters in themselves made the book worth the purchase, for me anyway.

Unfortunately after that I found my attention wandered about. For some reason which I don't quite understand, Garfield started mixing up things by putting stuff on modern use of dyes, and quotes on Mauve all around the place. This really didn't work for me at all. I found it plain distracting actually. Also I don't think Garfield has quite the talent and touch of really good historical writers such as Dava Sobel (Longitude) and Giles Milton (Big Chief Elizabeth) and I think that may have also contributed to my losing attention later on.

This book certainly has a place for those of you who enjoy reading about these small but essential bits of history which are all but forgotten in the modern age. The story is a very good one indeed. I just think it would have been much more gripping as a purely chronological history.

This is a fantastic accounting of a too little glorified period in the development of organic chemistry. The story will be inspiring to anyone who has an interest in chemistry and/or business. The latter because the story demonstrates the importance of recognizing and capitalizing on an unexpected invention (vs. more target-oriented discovery).

Unlike, most other popular science-related books that this is likely to be lumped with, it is enjoyably written, well researched and full of fascinating facts.

Mauve is part of an increasingly popular genre - Small Things That Mean A Lot. As (practically) the first artificial dye in the world, derived from coal tar, Mauve not only set the pattern for every other synthetic shade but also formed the basis for many other products in the new chemical world. This book tells this story and also that of its inventor, a Brit named William Perkin who discovered Mauve by accident when still at college. Mauve became the hit of London and Paris, though its inventor got rich mostly by making other colors.
The book runs the risk of being a little thin (Perkin is not a hugely interesting man), but Garfield keeps his work relevant and vibrant by some very elegant writing in which clever linkages are made between a vast array of subjects. I recommend this title for its insights into historical and modern fashion trends and some fascinating scientific history.
Amy De

Sure, this is a smallish book that does have many a side-trip added to its central story, but that story is well told and the side trips are quite entertaining.

The best part of the book is the life of Perkin AFTER he made it big. He was willing to capitalize on his insight, push his dream, make his fortune, and then ... stop. He retained his sense of himself and his faith until the end. And he didn't let the making of the fortune become his life's treasure. He reamined, according to this book, a modest man who understood what he was about and used his material success to benefit his family and others.

There are also interesting lessons to be learned about comparative advantage between nations and how internal and international political pressures create results that are not understood or even seen clearly until they become all too clear.

Worth the read. You can get through it in an entertaining evening or two.

I found this book often interesting and often confusing. People entered and exited frequently, and the insertion of some modern information about color broke the continuity of the author's message. I wished for more descriptions of the chemistry involved, what the various chemical reactions did, and how other chemists adapted Perkin's synthetic route to create new dyes. But the most descriptive information comes from Perkin's patent application, which sounds so general as to provide little useful information. So, this book gets three stars because it provided an easy summer read, but it lacked in scientific substance.