The subtitle for Mauve on the hardback jacket was ‘How One Man Invented A Colour That Changed The World’, but we abandoned that for the paperback because it had begun to sound naff. Suddenly there was a thriving literary genre that hardly existed before: books about small things that meant a lot. I was able to tell the full story of Perkin, his colour and the world of chemical dyes because of Longitude, Dava Sobel’s account of the life and inventions of the clockmaker John Harrison. This was something truly valuable, because previously this shade could only be obtained from Mediterranean shellfish, and it took an awful lot of them to make a ballgown. The residue of this experiment was a deep brown sludge that dyed his shirt a lustrous purple. The story of mauve was also interesting because its brilliant young inventor William Perkin had not previously given much thought to colour either he was searching for a way of making artificial quinine from coal-tar to save British soldiers dying from malaria in India, and he got something wrong in his formula. I had seldom given much thought to the origin of colours or their manufacture, nor the effect they might have on people’s lives. One of them, about the accidental discovery of the first mass-produced artificial dye, I found particularly intriguing. ‘Chemical Chaos’ contained, in simple language and cartoons, some fascinating stories of scientific discoveries and misdemeanours. The idea for Mauve came from a book my son Ben brought home one day from school.
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