Mauve

MAUVE is the story of a man who accidentally invented a color, and in the process transformed the world around him. Before 1856, the color in our lives--the reds, blues, and blacks of clothing, paint, print--came from insects or mollusks, roots or leaves, and dyeing was painstaking and expensive. But in 1856 eighteeen-year-old English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce color in a factory. Working on a treament for malaria in his London home laboratory, Perkin found mauve by chance. His experiments failed to result in artificial quinine as he had hoped, but produced instead a dark oily sludge that happened to turn silk a beautiful light purple.