Stuff You Should KnowThe story of why blueprints were blue is more involved than you think. It involves a chemical process and the Prussian Army. Yeah you heard me right.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Dates here in spirit. When you put us all together, you can call us the blue Man group. Best they could come up with on short notes.
Yeah, this is the I guess, the conclusion of our two part series on colors. Although we have done colors in the past. I know we did Indigo, and I think we did a short stuff on Haint blue, right.
Yes, and some other stuff. It's come up in some other things, but I think colors is going to be a never ending suite. There's a lot of colors to cover.
That's right. And this is a story of not only a color, but a process. And we're talking about the color of Prussian blue. And that is the color of a blueprint, like in the old days when blueprints were really blue, like blueprints for a house or a building, or a bridge or a tank or whatever you're going to design. That blue is called Prussian blue.
Yeah. And I mean if you go and look up blueprints up to about the fifties, I would say you are going to find actual blue blueprints, like you said. And there was a guy named John Herschel. He was an English astronomer, chemist and photographer. And this is back when photographer is really something. This is the eighteen forties. In eighteen forty two, he figured out that Prussian blue is photo reactive, meaning that when you expose it to light you can get Prussian blue. And he figured out that you could use that chemical reaction to make copies of things. It's extraordinarily clever. And I think John Herschel deserves to be in the Inventors Hall of Fame for this. Is he not I don't know. If he is, he deserves to be there. If not, he deserves to be there.
I agree. So this is the process. It's called cyanotype, and it was what early photographers used. In fact, the very first published photography book was made with cyanotype.
Yeah, that was, by the way, that was by Anna Atkins who's eighteen forty three book Photographs of British Algae. Get this, Chuck colon Cyana type impressions amazing.
So all of a sudden, architects and engineers were all over this stuff as well, because they realize, hey, if you can make a photograph using this syanotype process, you can make a copy of something. And we're really tired of redrawing everything over and over right exactly.
So the process involves producing blue ferric ferris cyanide. That's the chemical name for Prussian blue. And you'll notice there's a lot of feric stuff in there. That means it's made from iron salt, but it also is cyanide in it. And just from this researching this episode, Chuck, I finally understood what cyan as a blue refers to. It's referring to cyanide. Yeah, did you know that already? No, Well, I thought that was pretty cool.
That's awesome.
But if you take a drawing of something and you can put it on something that's basically see through these days, they use like clear plastic. If you're doing something like this and you have a line drawing and you put that line drawing on top of a paper that's been treated in blue ferric fair cyanide and these iron salts that make that, and you expose it to light, then that the paper beneath that's treated in the Prussian blue turns blue in every place except for where those lines were on top of it.
Yeah, So it's like a photo image in a dark room. And in fact, you have to do it in a dark room, just like you would a photograph. So that's why you know. They would draw it in regular ink on paper, and then the reverse negative image of that would be white drawing on blue paper and a really nice looking blue.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's gorgeous blue. Pressure and blue is fantastic.
Yeah. Man, I was typing in Prussian blue things and I saw some suit jackets, some wool suit jackets. Prussian blue. Gorgeous.
Yeah, you'd look like a member of the Prussian army from the nineteenth century.
That's right, That's why they named it that, right.
Yeah. Do you want to take a break and then come back and talk about where Prussian blue came from?
Let's do it.
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your Chuck, I want to learn a thing or two from josh Am Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, job.
So, Prussian blue finds its origins in the laboratory of an alchemist and a die maker. Of all places, it's a pretty cool place for a new thing to be created, especially something as beautiful as pressure blue. And the alchemist was a guy named Johann Conrad Dipple. How would you say Conrad in German Chuck, Mmm, that's probably right. Conrad or Conrad, I don't know. Actually, okay, well we'll just call him mister Dipple. He was the alchemist hair dip Air Dipple. Yeah, he was the alchemist, and the dye maker was a guy named Diesbach. We're just going with mister Disbach for this guy. And they shared this lab in Berlin, and by sharing a lab and sharing one another's or using like borrowing I should say, a cup of one another's you know ingredients here there, they ended up accidentally creating Prussian blue.
Yeah, exactly. I think the chemists was working on medicines like elixers and things, and Diesbach, as a die maker, was great at making these dyes. And as the story goes, he was making a deep red dye one day when he borrowed some potash from his chemist friend and that turned it into this wonderful, wonderful Prussian blue. He went back in hair Dipple and said, I got to figure out what this stuff is. And he figured out the secret was that the potash had ox blood and when he mixed that with the iron sulfate that caused this amazing blue to what does it do? Does it unveil itself.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great way to put it. So Prussian blue has unveiled itself. And at first they called it Berlin blue, and it only became known as Prussian blue later on because it was used to dye the uniforms of the Prussian army in the early nineteenth century, and depending on what part of the continent you were on, or whether you were on the continent at all, calling it Prussian blue was either a term of endearment or a term of disparagement because the Prussians helped save the British as cookies at Waterloo and defeated Napoleon. So if you were French, you didn't think very highly of the Prussians or they're blue. If you were English, it was a term of endearment because you were really grateful to the Prussians for coming in saving the day.
There, that's right.
And it became a just a popular color. Like artists loved using it, print makers loved using it. Obviously, these architects loved the result of using it. I'm not sure if they especially loved the color. That was just kind of what color blueprints turned out to be, right, But I'm sure, they were fine with it, but Herschel died before that blue printing process was born. I think five years later is when the actual architectural blueprint process that is unfortunately gone, because I think it looks really neat these days. You're not going to find that because over the years a lot of different things happened to either make it fall out of fashion or just make it cheaper and safer and easier to make copies in different ways.
I would bet that there's some hipster artisan architectural firm that still uses this process now you think has gone back to it, Yeah, but the reason that has largely been abandon is because it's a very labor intensive, time intensive process, even if you're using kind of updated machinery, and other processes came along that seem to do a better job. And plus also I don't know if everybody's like, we're sick of the blue or whatever, because there's another process called diazo white press, and it does the same thing, but it gives you like black or gray lines on a white background, and that's kind of what the what the architectural plants look like today. They don't look blue anymore. And then shortly After that, they came up with zerographic copiers, which you just today call it copier. And I didn't realize this either, chuck. They're called zero graphic because this is a dry process, like zero like dry, like zero scaping. It's a dry process because you don't have to wet the paper that is receiving the image like you do when you're using the old Prussian blue cyanotype process.
Yeah, and I think that's how Xerox got their name, right.
Yeah, for sure, which is a proprietary eponym.
Yeah, And I thought I thought the diaso process created blue lines. Is that not true?
I think later on they figured out that if you use blue lines on the original, it makes a cleaner line on the copy. That's what that was my take on it.
All right, And I think that was sort of like in the seventies and then in the early two thousands is when the d'azzo process started to kind of fade away because you know, ammonia is not something you want to be working with a lot, and there are also regulations that increased in working with ammonia. And then you know, the digital revolution came along print technology things that were cheaper basically and smaller. All of a sudden, you didn't have to have some huge like plot printer in your office to make something like this, and it, you know, it did, like everything, it became cheaper and smaller and faster.
Yeah, and I think the printers that can print out you know, like regulation size architectural planes or engineering plans, those became more affordable too, And they're basically just xeroxes. They're like printers essentially, just bigger size. The one thing I did see, Chuck that I didn't realize pen plotters. It's like a contraption originally where you have a pen and connected to that pen is a bunch of other pens, and so when you're drawing on one paper, the other pins are drawing on their own paper. So you're making copies like that as you're drawing in the first place. Those have come back and they're now computerized.
Yeah, plotters are super cool. At a frien years ago that was a sign maker and he would, you know, these plotters would cut out these designs from the computer files and it's just really cool to see those things. You know, that automation at work, even for like a small business. You know, he was like a team of one. The other thing I wanted to mention too, is I think the d'azza's faded in sunlight. Oh okay, which it was fine for a little while because apparently it takes you know, like a few months, which was enough if you're you know, if it's like a house plan or something, you don't need it to last forever. But eventually they were like, you know, we should probably make something a little more permanent.
That connects the dots for me, because I saw on some archivist website that they do not recommend using the d'atzo print because it isn't it's so impermanent. Now I have it, knowing's half the battle, as they say, Cyan Cian. Chuck said, Cyan, I follow it up with a Scian too, and everybody that means short stuff is out.
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
