Flutterby™! : Mauve

Just finished Mauve: How one man invented a color that changed the world, by Simon Garfield (ISBN 0-393-02005-3). It's the tale of how William Perkins, at the tender age of 18, discovered how to turn coal tar into dye, and how that discovery in 1856 spawned, or predicted, a lot of advances in the chemistry of both dyes and pharmeceuticals.

Hiking last week we talked about the "...that changed the world" fad in books, and in trying to be both that and a biography of William Perkins, Mauve fails. Short on the descriptions of the chemistry that would make it compelling, and short on the dish about the private life of Perkins, it instead becomes a loosely assembled recounting of facts without enough context to make anything really compelling. The narrative has a tendency to jump around temporally, he'll insert an anecdote of something that happened ten years later, and so the story never really conveyed to me the effects of the movement, of industrialization, and of the culture back on the companies.

One thing I did note was the mention of how Germany's supremacy in the dye industry gave them a leg up on the manufacture of explosives in the first world war. I've been concerned recently about the effects of the United States losing manufacturing capabilities. Given that much of the cost of starting up a product is getting the bugs worked out of the production line, more of what's actually involved in product development is moving to Asia, and I see the United States being stratified into people shuffling around the money and the service economy making those folks lattés. How long is it going to be before the places that have all of the factories, and that are quickly gaining the expertise and the cultures necessary to innovate, realize that posession counts for more than law?

But I digress. While Mauveworks from some fascinating source material, alas it never quite puts it together in a way that makes it as compelling or informative as it has the potential to be. So, skip it.