Decoder Ring | How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Look in the nonfiction section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of history books making the same bold claim: that their narrow, unexpected subject somehow changed the world. Potatoes, kudzu, soccer, coffee, Iceland, bees, oak trees, sand, chickens—there are books about all of them, and many more besides, with the phrase “changed the world” or something similarly grandiose right there in the title. These books are sometimes called “microhistories” or “thing biographies” and they’ve been a trope in publishing for decades. In this episode, we establish where this trend came from, figure out why it’s been so persistent, and then we put a bunch of authors on the spot, asking them to make the case for why their subjects changed the world.
The writers you’ll hear from include:
- Simon Garfield (Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World)
- Mark Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World)
- George Gibson, publisher of Cod and Dava Sobel’s Longitude
- Historian Bronwen Everill
- Slate writer Henry Grabar (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World)
- Gastropod co-host Nicola Twilley (Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves)
- Tim Queeney (Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization)
- Leila Philip (Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America).
This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman also produce our show. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
Thank you to Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America; Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World; Tina Lupton; Dan Kois; and Nancy Miller.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the late 1990s, the author Simon Garfield found himself leafing through a book his son had brought home from school. |
| 0:11.9 | It was like a horrible history's kind of book, and it was about all these experiments that people had conducted, mostly men, mostly Victorians, that had gone wrong in some way. |
| 0:24.4 | Like think of scientists who caused eye-gouging, life-taking explosions while trying to isolate compounds and elements, |
| 0:31.8 | or the one who discovered that wastes from an ammunition factory made a good toilet bowl cleaner. |
| 0:37.5 | But one story in the book particularly grabbed Simon. |
| 0:41.0 | It had a two-page spread on this man called William Perkin. |
| 0:46.4 | In 1856, Perkin was an 18-year-old chemist living in London. |
| 0:51.3 | He was trying to find a way to make an artificial quinine |
| 0:57.0 | to save troops dying in Africa and India of malaria. |
| 1:02.8 | So one day in his lab, Perkin was attempting to do just that. |
| 1:07.1 | And he got one element of the molecule wrong. |
| 1:10.9 | Instead of quinine, Perkin had made something new. |
| 1:14.4 | A sort of dark, purply sludge. |
| 1:18.2 | The legend goes that Perkin promptly got the sludge all over his shirt, |
| 1:22.7 | which instantly turned a deep, bright, unfatable purple. |
| 1:29.3 | And he thought, okay, that is interesting. This wasn't what I was going for at all. |
| 1:32.3 | But if we can make an artificial color like this, then I can make quite a lot of money. |
| 1:38.3 | Up to this point, all clothing dyes had come from some natural source, |
| 1:43.3 | and it had been particularly difficult to afford purple. |
| 1:47.5 | Which you could normally only make by gathering, you know, a million shellfish from the Mediterranean shore, which was where purple came from. |
| 1:58.1 | So in 1859, William Perkin set up a dye works in London and began selling his creation, |
| 2:05.2 | the first ever commercial artificial dye, a color known as... |
... |
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