Mauve It’s WH Perkin’s 176th birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Henry_Perkin.jpg It was strange on Saturday, while visiting the William Morris Gallery, to read Morris’s denunciation of aniline dyes and his praise of cochineal. Perkin’s discovery of mauveine at the age of eighteen is one of the triumphs of the Victorian scientific imagination. I don’t agree with Lawrence either, but he’s nearer the truth here than Morris: ‘…How boring, how small Shakespeares people are! Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.’ I played the part of Perkin-as-narrator when five years ago we put on a play [based on my cousin’s husband’s exhaustive researches] with children from a school near the Elephant: Hofmann teaches his students about producing quinine by chemical means, Perkin and his associates set up a dye-works [very near the school] to cope with the demand for mauve, they go on to make magenta and then realise that the magenta molecule can be modified to make a whole new family of dyes. They thereby introduce an important chemical principle which later proved invaluable, particularly in combating resistance to therapeutic agents for infectious diseases. We – me and the ten-year-olds – did this through drama and mime. The Hofmann Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, Richard Templer, unveiled a plaque to the Simpson, Maule & Nicholson dyeworks – assisted by a 10-year-old actor who had just played the original Professor A.W. Hofmann (1818-1892). I took off my beard and hoped that, even if Morris would have offered less support, Perkin would have approved of this marriage of science and art: flickr/photos/secretlondon/3862478561/ It wasn’t so long before others were using magenta: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Gauguin_099.jpg and: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Matissetoits.gif
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 09:01:32 +0000
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