Mauve
Extract
From Chapter 3: Just How Much a New Colour Was Worth
In the first months of 1856, Gustave Flaubert began
Madame Bovary, Karl Bechstein opened his piano
factory, the plans for the bell Big Ben were drawn
up at
a foundry in Whitechapel and Queen Victoria instituted the Victoria Cross.
During the Easter holidays of that year, August Hofmann returned briefly
to Germany, and William Perkin retired to his laboratory on the top floor
of his home in the East End of London. Perkin’s domestic workplace
contained a small table and a few shelves for bottles. He had constructed
a furnace in the fireplace. There was no running water or gas supply, and
the room was lit by old glass spirit lamps. It was an amateur’s laboratory,
an enthusiast’s collection of stained beakers and testubes and rudimentary
chemicals. The room smelled of ammonia. The table on which he worked was
stained with spillage from previous efforts, and probably from ink. He was
surrounded by landscape paintings and early photographs, and by jugs and
mugs and other domestic trinkets that were as alien to a laboratory as delicate
soda crystals were to any other house in this smoky residential neighbourhood.
It was an unexpected setting for one of chemistry’s most romantic
and significant moments.
Looking back, Perkin adopted a rather nonchalent tone to describe his actions. “I
was endeavouring to convert an artificial base into the natural alcoloid
quinine, but my experiment, instead of yielding the colourless quinine,
gave a reddish
powder. With a desire to understand this particular result, a different base
of more simple construction was selected, viz. aniline, and in this case
obtained a perfectly black product. This was purified and dried, and when
digested with
spirits of wine gave the mauve dye.”
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