“The recipe of Egyptian blue used by the Romans had been lost to history some time in the middle ages,” Davies explains. Bright, true blue, in particular, was difficult to find. Certain hues were difficult to manufacture, while others didn’t last long on the canvas without fading or mutating into some other, less desirable hue. At the time, paints were expensive and many colors weren’t readily available. “The immense value of the substance was immediately clear,” writes historian Hugh Davies. The two Johanns discovered the blue pigment the following day. When Diesbach grabbed Dippel’s oil-coated instrument and plunged it into his vat of red dye, he had no clue he was about to create an entirely new (and highly profitable) color. Dippel had been working to invent a recipe for immortality, but instead he created Dippel’s oil, an awful-smelling mixture made of crushed animal bones (sometimes also called “bone oil” or “animal oil” or “bone sauce”) that would eventually be used as a chemical weapon during World War II. One day, Diesbach was working on a batch of cochineal (a brilliant red dye made from crushed insects) when he used a tainted instrument from Dippel’s table to mix his crimson brew. The story goes like this: in the early years of the eighteenth century, alchemist and avid dissector Johann Conrad Dippel (who is rumored to have been the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) was sharing a lab in Berlin with Swiss pigment maker Johann Jacob Diesbach. Its invention was, like penicillin and saccharin, the product of happenstance. Dyes are pigments that are dissolved and absorbed in a fluid.”) The microcrystalline blue powder has been around since 1705. According to Color Studies by Edith Anderson Feisner, a pigment is a “powder that are in a binder such as acrylic or oil which covers and adheres to a surface. (A quick note: pigments and dyes are not the same. Darker than cobalt and moodier even than indigo (and with enough green that it sometimes reads as a dark teal), Prussian blue is often called the first modern pigment. Screens emit too much light to properly showcase the texture and depth of Prussian blue, a hue that is both a color and a material. Unfortunately, like many high-chroma (i.e., high-intensity) pigments, Prussian blue can’t be accurately displayed on a computer. I’m so sorry you can’t see her properly, because she is beautiful. It’s an accidental pigment, a happenstance color, and an antidote for heavy metal poisoning. It’s the color of waves and stamps and too many paintings to count. A blue that Thoreau thought needed to be Americanized, like Freedom fries. This is the story of a blue most common, and most beloved.
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