MAUVE

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/arts/12MASL.html

The "one great joke" told about William Perkin by his peers was that he did 
not "discover the coal-tar colors by observing the iridescent film on tar 
distributing itself over the surface of a pool of water." Perhaps it would 
help to be a 19th-century chemist to see the howler in that. But what they 
meant was that Perkin had been rather more sophisticated than a man gazing 
at a puddle in 1856 when he made the discovery that led to scientific 
breakthroughs and brought him fame and fortune. In fact, he had also been 
naïve, intuitive, wildly lucky and only 18.
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