The Colour Mauve Trivia Quiz

Answer: 18

William Perkin was born the youngest of seven children on 12 March 1838 in the East End of London. He attended the Arthur Terrace School until the age of 13 when he transferred to the City of London School, near St Paul's Cathedral. After some opposition from his father, he enrolled at the Royal College of Chemistry in 1853, aged 15. Upon completion of the basic course, in 1855 he became the youngest assistant of the director, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.

He discovered the mauve dye in the laboratory he had built at home.

Answer: a treatment for malaria

The only effective treatment for malaria, which was endemic in many countries of the world (including the Fens and marshes of England, France, Spain, Holland and Italy), was quinine, obtained from cinchona bark. Its chemical constituents were known and differed slightly from those of naphthaladine which had been isolated from coal tar, a waste product of coal gasification. By adding water, which contained the extra hydrogen and oxygen needed, Perkin hoped to synthesise quinine.

The alternative choices were all indirect consequences of Perkin's work which showed that the relatively new science of chemistry had a practical use and led to huge growth in the number of chemists.

Answer: it is French for the mallow plant

There are about a thousand species of mallows which are known for the slimy protein (mucilage) they contain. They are used in many herbal remedies and originally marshmallow sweets were made by boiling marsh mallow roots and extracting the mucilage which was useful as a cough suppressant. The flower of the Common Mallow is the light blue purple colour now known as mauve.

Answer: Greenford Green

With support and financial help from his father, Perkin located his factory on a 6 acre meadow near the Grand Junction Canal at Greenford Green, near Harrow, Middlesex. Construction began at the end of June 1857 and a year later silk was being dyed mauve by Thomas Keith at his factory in Bethnal Green. Perth was where Perkin met Robert Pullar, a dyer, who was enthusiastic about mauve from the start and introduced Perkin to Keith who found the techniques to make mauve a commercial success. Leeds was where Perkin addressed the British Association in 1858 and revealed the results of his endeavours to the scientific community in general.

Answer: Empress Eugenie

The Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, was encouraged by her husband to promote trade by wearing fashionable silk garments and soon became the leading fashion icon of her day. She was one of the first to wear mauve but the dye used was a natural one made in France where it was also called "Perkin's purple". Perkin liked the association of the word "mauve" with Parisian haute couture and adopted it instead of his original name "Tyrian purple".

Answer: madder

The long roots of the madder plant, when boiled, produce a red dye. Traditionally, red dyes were used for military uniforms so when Emmanuel Verguin made an artificial red dye from aniline, the same compound from which mauve dye was produced, it was in great demand.

He named it fuchsine after the fuchsia plant but the colour became known in Britain firstly as solferino and later as magenta, the names of battles in the Second Italian War of Independence where the soldiers' uniforms were of this colour.

Answer: all of them

Perkin was canny enough to obtain a British patent for his mauve dye in August 1856 but failed to obtain a French one and dyers there exploited his discovery for their own benefit. The British Patent Office later bungled Perkin's application for alizarin, an artificial madder red with the result that he had the monopoly only in Britain and the German firm BASF had it elsewhere. Crinoline dresses, another of the Empress Eugenie's fashions, used huge amounts of material which increased the demand for the popular mauve dye. Queen Victoria wore mauve velvet to the wedding of her daughter, Princess Victoria to Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858 and when she came out of mourning for Prince Albert.

Answer: Punch

The "Punch" article described the spread of mauve as an infectious disease which affected the mind and body. Apparently, it mainly affected women as men who caught it could be treated easily "with one good dose of ridicule". "The Times" first used the word "mauve" in a "Found" notice which described "a handsome Lady's Parasol, left there by two ladies, of mauve colour, lined inside with white". " All the Year Round" was a weekly journal, first published in 1859.

As well as publishing the serialisation of "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens, the September issue also included an article "Perkins's (sic) Purple" which discussed the importance of chemistry for trade. "Once a Week" was a rival journal to "All the Year Round", published by the proprietors of "Punch".

Answer: Oscar Wilde in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

"The Picture of Dorian Gray", Wilde's only published novel, appeared in 1890, at the start of the "Mauve Decade". During this decade, mauve became associated with homosexuality, succeeded later by lavender and in the 1970s, pink.

Answer: All of them

Perkin's scientific contributions were celebrated by several hundred chemists at the Royal Institution in July 1906, in the same room where the schoolboy Perkin had sat in on lectures by Michael Faraday. There followed a busy year at the end of which Perkin complained of exhaustion.

After picking up a virus, he succumbed to double pneumonia and appendicitis and died on 14 July 1907, aged 69.