Author: Garfield, Simon
Humanities
Published on 24 April 2018 by CANONGATE BOOKS LTD (Canongate Canons) as part of 'the Canons' series.
Paperback | 256 pages, 8pp plate section
192 x 141 x 41 | 206g
1856. Eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin's experiment has gone horribly wrong. But the deep brown sludge his botched project has produced has an unexpected power: the power to dye everything it touches a brilliant purple. Perkin has discovered mauve, the world's first synthetic dye, bridging a gap between pure chemistry and industry which will change the world forever.
From the fetching ribbons tying back the hair of every fashionable head in London to the laboratories in which scientists developed modern vaccines against cancer and malaria, Simon Garfield tells the story of how the colour purple became a sensation.