One Man and His Color: Reflections on Mauve’s 150th Birthday

Sir William Henry Perkin, 1906. Williams Haynes Portrait Collection, CHF.

By Simon Garfield

At the end of April I was invited to attend the first of many celebrations organized by the Society of Dyers and Colourists (SDC) to mark the 150th anniversary of the invention of mauve. The society, based in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, has had many famous past presidents, but the most famous by far was Sir William Henry Perkin, whose life we had gathered to celebrate. But this was no ordinary birthday celebration. The SDC chose the occasion to award its Perkin Medal, a supremely rare and valuable accolade (solid gold, and as big as a drink coaster), for the first time this century. Not one but three recipients—Ichiro Endo of Canon, Minoru Usui of Seiko Epson, and John Vaught of Hewlett-Packard—shared the spotlight for their roles in inventing inkjet and thermal color printing. There were other prizes and certificates too, celebrating color education and research, color physics, and the specialists from Pakistan, India, and Germany who had traveled to receive them.

I wondered what Perkin, who died 99 years ago adorned with a fashionable long white beard, would have made of it all, and I concluded that he would have been delighted. He might have found the thought of a color printing machine in every home capable of producing photographs and CD labels baffling, but only because of the technology involved, not the underlying concept. After all, color printing is ultimately just the transference of fast color to paper. And he would have loved the idea of these innovations, because, as bold, useful, cheap, commercial, clever, and revolutionary tools, they represent the hallmarks of the ideas he himself developed.

Several people in the magnificent Cartwright Hall—Bradford’s civic art gallery and a monument to when this northern part of England ran the woolen trade for the world—had put on a mauve tie or blouse for the occasion, and as I addressed them from a podium in my mauve shirt I still felt it slightly hard to believe that a man could actually invent a color at all, or that it would have had such a remarkable effect on the world. The essential elements of the Perkin story will be familiar to many readers: the first mass-produced aniline dye came about by accident when an 18-year-old student was looking for a way to manufacture quinine to save British troops collapsing from malaria in India; Queen Victoria and Empress Eugenie loved it and made it the hippest color in town; before Perkin’s discovery about 10,000 defenseless mollusks would have to be slaughtered on a Mediterranean beach to get a purple like mauve; its name is derived from the French word for the pale-violet mallow plant; and the real Mauve Decade occurred in the 1860s, when, with the crinoline rage at its height, you couldn’t walk down London’s Oxford Street without thinking there was something wrong with your eyes. All these things may be gleaned from any decent biography of Perkin on the Internet, in chemical industry publications, or even—dare I say it—in my own book. But the lasting effects of Perkin’s discovery are worth emphasizing, and for that we need a grasp of the basics.

Mauve was a derivative of coal tar with an aniline base. It was the first commercially available mass-produced dye, and the idea that you could make color in a factory was a revelation. Not long afterward Perkin produced a green and a violet, and soon the canal outside his factory was turning a different color every week. In time other dyers would also find ways to artificially produce the rainbow.
Mauve was also the indirect inspiration for other coal-tar derivatives. Perkin himself twisted the molecule to produce a perfume known as coumarin, which smelled like fresh-mown hay and was one of the carcinogenic chemicals previously used in cigarettes. There were explosives too; mauve was a highly unstable molecule, and Perkin’s colleagues often wondered how he avoided blowing himself to pieces.

Mauve was also significant as one of the first important links between pure chemistry and industry. The distrust between the two is nothing new: Perkin’s ambitions were frowned upon at the time of his invention.

Most important, perhaps, were the scientific and medicinal uses of artificial dyes. Histologists started using the dyes to stain samples within a decade of Perkin’s discovery (see “Chemistry, Microscopy, and the Nanoworld,” pages 14–19 in this issue). In 1882, well into Perkin’s retirement, the German biologist Walther Flemming used them to study cells under a microscope. The staining process gave him the first clear picture of the nucleus, a mass of proteins that Flemming initially called chromatin, from the Greek word for color. On closer inspection, and with further dyeing, he observed cells in the process of division and named the threadlike bundles chromosomes.

Today artificial dyes play a crucial role in many aspects of genetic identification, and the mapping of the human genome would have been impossible without them. Their role in medicine has been equally dramatic. Coal-tar derivatives were crucial in the work of the German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, particularly in his pioneering development of chemotherapy. His colleague Robert Koch, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905, used the dye methylene blue to discover the tuberculosis bacillus. A few years ago researchers at Imperial College in London found a revolutionary use for dyes in an important treatment of cancer called photodynamic therapy, in which tumors are stained before being blasted with a high-precision laser. Modern dyes are now employed in work that perhaps would have pleased Perkin more than any other—the search for a vaccine against malaria.

So perhaps it’s strange that Perkin’s work isn’t better known. Mention his name on Main Street or Fifth Avenue and you may not get much of a response. The Independent (London) ran a good article on him earlier this year but still managed to call him Perkins, which is a consistent problem. The idea of a man called Perkin without an s unsettles people. Even Microsoft Word’s spellcheck program doesn’t like it: a little red squiggle questions the veracity of Perkin but not Perkins.

I recently made a visit to Wembley, the site of Britain’s long-delayed new national sports stadium and very near to where Perkin used to live. My guide (one of the architects) took me around the Royal Box, up to the very top of the upper tier, and then down to something called the Corinthian Restaurant, the stadium’s luxury dining facility. He explained that the color scheme was going to be mauve, because a man who had lived not far away had invented the color and it was really important. I played dumb and stood there enthralled. He told me how the canal that you could see from the restaurant turned a different color every week, depending on what dye was being produced at the chemist’s factory in Greenford Green. “And the name of the chemist,” he said, “was William Perkins.”

But here’s the most important thing to remember about what Perkin discovered over the Easter holidays 150 years ago. Not only did he end up with the most beautiful purple dye instead of the quinine he was looking for, but he didn’t throw it away as perhaps you or I would have done. He had true vision and great courage. With the right advice and a bit of seed money from his father, he built a factory, took out a few patents, and grew wealthy. But then the British failed to protect what was theirs, the chemists fell prey to German spies and lax industrial protection, and the dyeing industry passed from the Grand Union Canal to the banks of the Ruhr and the Rhine, then to the United States, and finally to the developing world.

Sir William’s greatest lessons are that there is no shame in combining science and industry and—most important of all—that it pays to go with your instincts. Perkin had no idea what would happen with his chance discovery, but he wanted to find out. To see his legacy we need only look around.