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 World
For 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. In 1856 he had accidentally invented the first artificial colour, which happened to be beautiful, and, as it turned out, widely consequential. It overturned the prevailing belief, shared by Perkin’s own father, that the science of chemistry was not especially useful, let alone lucrative. Perkin’s discovery also initiated the betrothal, however stormy it has since become, of science and industry. For elucidation of these curiosities there is no better volume than Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World.
Garfield’s fifth book was undertaken, as many worthy projects have been, by happy accident. “I’ve got a 13-year-old son,” Garfield explained over the telephone from his London home. “Maybe three years ago he was reading a book, called Chemical Chaos. 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. “I thought, well, this is a story that I haven’t heard,” Garfield said. “I hadn’t thought about a colour being invented before.”
It would be a precocious 13-year-old indeed, at least in America, who’d have the attention span to fully read the book this epiphany inspired Garfield to write. As he put it: “Chemistry as we know it is not necessarily the sexiest topic.” On the other hand, William Perkin was only a precocious 18-year-old when, trying to synthesize quinine (then the only known treatment for malaria), he made a lasting fashion statement instead. “My main criterion for doing a story.” Garfield said, “Will it be interesting for me to spend.in this case, 18 months with it? It’s something I’ve heard fiction writers say,” he recalled. “Once you embark on a topic, wherever you turn you then see things that relate to your story. Almost every book I opened, there would be the colour mauve on the page.” Readers of Mauve will unfailingly enjoy-or perhaps come to resent – a similar experience.
As a benefit of earned trust, it’s the nonfictioner’s prerogative to export his own preoccupation to his readers, preferably in the form of tasty, ponderable truths; to offer new insights on old subjects, or even new subjects, about which we hadn’t even known to say, “Oh, how interesting.” To Garfield’s credit, Mauve often feels like a cozy and companionable public television documentary-one that you may not have even planned to watch, but that enraptures you at least enough to delay your other plans:
Within two years of Perkin’s invention, it seemed that everyone was having a go at dyemaking. Industry had showed Victorian chemists what was possible, and now nothing seemed beyond achievement; an eighteen-year-old had created a new shade for a woman’s shawl, and the full force of chemical ambition was unleashed. And of course there was much money to be made, and many fortunes to be lost, and a great amount of litigation.
“I couldn’t possibly imagine myself as one of these scholars,” the author confessed. “I’m finding these things out as I go.” However humble that sounds, though, some readers may still shudder at the implied research shimmering below Garfield’s lines, or his sizeable bibliography, or, well, the chemistry.
Garfield studied chemistry enough to matriculate from high school, but hadn’t then considered it of special interest. “What you don’t learn is any history. You learn things as they are now,” he said, explaining that the scientific community has expressed gratitude for the publication of Mauve. “There’s been a huge amount of books about physics, chaos, genetics,” he said, yet few on the early and enduring achievements of chemistry.
One simple way Garfield has managed to popularize his subject (and enjoy the fruits of painstaking research) is by opening his chapters with enlightening and often amusing quotations, regarding mauve, from such diverse sources as Goethe, John Fowles, Sports Illustrated, and USA Today. “It was a great joy to kind of drop in quotes,” he said. And it goes a long way toward affirming the idea that a colour deserves its own book. Garfield allowed, too, that Mauve is “very much an English tale.” That seemed to please him, and it’s no surprise given some of his previous titles: The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, and The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS.
Garfield is now deeply immersed in his next book, set roughly 30 years before Perkin’s discovery, about the birth of Britain’s railways. He described the project as very detailed. “I’ve got some material which hasn’t been seen before. It’s a good tale.” Meanwhile a British TV company has bought the option to film Mauve, somehow. Garfield doesn’t know if or when or how such an endeavour will proceed, but, he said, “If it’s to work, you can’t deviate from the facts.” Whatever form it takes, the movie Mauve promises vividness at the very least-as long as it’s not in black-and-white. Whether to focus on the history he made or on Perkin himself is the pressing question. “He was a brilliant man and awfully important, but he wasn’t the most fascinating man at home,” Garfield conceded. “A very humble, churchgoing chap. He was not Mr. Twice-Nightly, really.” Still, international attention has proven Garfield right to think Perkin’s story worth telling. Mauve really does explain how Perkin’s colour changed the world, and thereby makes an estimable contribution to our written history of technology. “It’s a colour, and a curiosity,” said the author, “that kind of permeates throughout the world.”
