Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Dates here in spirit.
Speaker 1: When you put us all together, you can call us
Speaker 1: the blue Man group. Best they could come up with
Speaker 1: on short notes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the I guess, the conclusion of our
Speaker 2: two part series on colors. Although we have done colors
Speaker 2: in the past. I know we did Indigo, and I
Speaker 2: think we did a short stuff on Haint blue, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, and some other stuff. It's come up in some
Speaker 1: other things, but I think colors is going to be
Speaker 1: a never ending suite. There's a lot of colors to cover.
Speaker 2: That's right. And this is a story of not only
Speaker 2: a color, but a process. And we're talking about the
Speaker 2: color of Prussian blue. And that is the color of
Speaker 2: a blueprint, like in the old days when blueprints were
Speaker 2: really blue, like blueprints for a house or a building,
Speaker 2: or a bridge or a tank or whatever you're going
Speaker 2: to design. That blue is called Prussian blue.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I mean if you go and look up
Speaker 1: blueprints up to about the fifties, I would say you
Speaker 1: are going to find actual blue blueprints, like you said.
Speaker 1: And there was a guy named John Herschel. He was
Speaker 1: an English astronomer, chemist and photographer. And this is back
Speaker 1: when photographer is really something. This is the eighteen forties.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty two, he figured out that Prussian blue
Speaker 1: is photo reactive, meaning that when you expose it to
Speaker 1: light you can get Prussian blue. And he figured out
Speaker 1: that you could use that chemical reaction to make copies
Speaker 1: of things. It's extraordinarily clever. And I think John Herschel
Speaker 1: deserves to be in the Inventors Hall of Fame for this.
Speaker 1: Is he not I don't know. If he is, he
Speaker 1: deserves to be there. If not, he deserves to be there.
Speaker 2: I agree. So this is the process. It's called cyanotype,
Speaker 2: and it was what early photographers used. In fact, the
Speaker 2: very first published photography book was made with cyanotype.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was, by the way, that was by Anna
Speaker 1: Atkins who's eighteen forty three book Photographs of British Algae.
Speaker 1: Get this, Chuck colon Cyana type impressions amazing.
Speaker 2: So all of a sudden, architects and engineers were all
Speaker 2: over this stuff as well, because they realize, hey, if
Speaker 2: you can make a photograph using this syanotype process, you
Speaker 2: can make a copy of something. And we're really tired
Speaker 2: of redrawing everything over and over right exactly.
Speaker 1: So the process involves producing blue ferric ferris cyanide. That's
Speaker 1: the chemical name for Prussian blue. And you'll notice there's
Speaker 1: a lot of feric stuff in there. That means it's
Speaker 1: made from iron salt, but it also is cyanide in it.
Speaker 1: And just from this researching this episode, Chuck, I finally
Speaker 1: understood what cyan as a blue refers to. It's referring
Speaker 1: to cyanide. Yeah, did you know that already? No, Well,
Speaker 1: I thought that was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: But if you take a drawing of something and you
Speaker 1: can put it on something that's basically see through these days,
Speaker 1: they use like clear plastic. If you're doing something like
Speaker 1: this and you have a line drawing and you put
Speaker 1: that line drawing on top of a paper that's been
Speaker 1: treated in blue ferric fair cyanide and these iron salts
Speaker 1: that make that, and you expose it to light, then
Speaker 1: that the paper beneath that's treated in the Prussian blue
Speaker 1: turns blue in every place except for where those lines
Speaker 1: were on top of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like a photo image in a dark room.
Speaker 2: And in fact, you have to do it in a
Speaker 2: dark room, just like you would a photograph. So that's
Speaker 2: why you know. They would draw it in regular ink
Speaker 2: on paper, and then the reverse negative image of that
Speaker 2: would be white drawing on blue paper and a really
Speaker 2: nice looking blue.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's gorgeous blue. Pressure and blue is fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, I was typing in Prussian blue things and
Speaker 2: I saw some suit jackets, some wool suit jackets. Prussian blue. Gorgeous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd look like a member of the Prussian army
Speaker 1: from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: That's right, That's why they named it that, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you want to take a break and then
Speaker 1: come back and talk about where Prussian blue came from?
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: Well, now we're on the road, driving in your Chuck,
Speaker 3: I want to learn a thing or two from josh
Speaker 3: Am Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, job.
Speaker 1: So, Prussian blue finds its origins in the laboratory of
Speaker 1: an alchemist and a die maker. Of all places, it's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool place for a new thing to be created,
Speaker 1: especially something as beautiful as pressure blue. And the alchemist
Speaker 1: was a guy named Johann Conrad Dipple. How would you
Speaker 1: say Conrad in German Chuck, Mmm, that's probably right. Conrad
Speaker 1: or Conrad, I don't know. Actually, okay, well we'll just
Speaker 1: call him mister Dipple. He was the alchemist hair dip
Speaker 1: Air Dipple. Yeah, he was the alchemist, and the dye
Speaker 1: maker was a guy named Diesbach. We're just going with
Speaker 1: mister Disbach for this guy. And they shared this lab
Speaker 1: in Berlin, and by sharing a lab and sharing one
Speaker 1: another's or using like borrowing I should say, a cup
Speaker 1: of one another's you know ingredients here there, they ended
Speaker 1: up accidentally creating Prussian blue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think the chemists was working on medicines
Speaker 2: like elixers and things, and Diesbach, as a die maker,
Speaker 2: was great at making these dyes. And as the story goes,
Speaker 2: he was making a deep red dye one day when
Speaker 2: he borrowed some potash from his chemist friend and that
Speaker 2: turned it into this wonderful, wonderful Prussian blue. He went
Speaker 2: back in hair Dipple and said, I got to figure
Speaker 2: out what this stuff is. And he figured out the
Speaker 2: secret was that the potash had ox blood and when
Speaker 2: he mixed that with the iron sulfate that caused this
Speaker 2: amazing blue to what does it do? Does it unveil itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great way to put it.
Speaker 1: So Prussian blue has unveiled itself. And at first they
Speaker 1: called it Berlin blue, and it only became known as
Speaker 1: Prussian blue later on because it was used to dye
Speaker 1: the uniforms of the Prussian army in the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and depending on what part of the continent you were on,
Speaker 1: or whether you were on the continent at all, calling
Speaker 1: it Prussian blue was either a term of endearment or
Speaker 1: a term of disparagement because the Prussians helped save the
Speaker 1: British as cookies at Waterloo and defeated Napoleon. So if
Speaker 1: you were French, you didn't think very highly of the
Speaker 1: Prussians or they're blue. If you were English, it was
Speaker 1: a term of endearment because you were really grateful to
Speaker 1: the Prussians for coming in saving the day.
Speaker 3: There, that's right.
Speaker 2: And it became a just a popular color. Like artists
Speaker 2: loved using it, print makers loved using it. Obviously, these
Speaker 2: architects loved the result of using it. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: if they especially loved the color. That was just kind
Speaker 2: of what color blueprints turned out to be, right, But
Speaker 2: I'm sure, they were fine with it, but Herschel died
Speaker 2: before that blue printing process was born. I think five
Speaker 2: years later is when the actual architectural blueprint process that
Speaker 2: is unfortunately gone, because I think it looks really neat
Speaker 2: these days. You're not going to find that because over
Speaker 2: the years a lot of different things happened to either
Speaker 2: make it fall out of fashion or just make it
Speaker 2: cheaper and safer and easier to make copies in different ways.
Speaker 1: I would bet that there's some hipster artisan architectural firm
Speaker 1: that still uses this process now you think has gone
Speaker 1: back to it, Yeah, but the reason that has largely
Speaker 1: been abandon is because it's a very labor intensive, time
Speaker 1: intensive process, even if you're using kind of updated machinery,
Speaker 1: and other processes came along that seem to do a
Speaker 1: better job. And plus also I don't know if everybody's like,
Speaker 1: we're sick of the blue or whatever, because there's another
Speaker 1: process called diazo white press, and it does the same thing,
Speaker 1: but it gives you like black or gray lines on
Speaker 1: a white background, and that's kind of what the what
Speaker 1: the architectural plants look like today. They don't look blue anymore.
Speaker 1: And then shortly After that, they came up with zerographic copiers,
Speaker 1: which you just today call it copier. And I didn't
Speaker 1: realize this either, chuck. They're called zero graphic because this
Speaker 1: is a dry process, like zero like dry, like zero scaping.
Speaker 1: It's a dry process because you don't have to wet
Speaker 1: the paper that is receiving the image like you do
Speaker 1: when you're using the old Prussian blue cyanotype process.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's how Xerox got their name, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, which is a proprietary eponym.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I thought I thought the diaso process created
Speaker 2: blue lines. Is that not true?
Speaker 1: I think later on they figured out that if you
Speaker 1: use blue lines on the original, it makes a cleaner
Speaker 1: line on the copy. That's what that was my take
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 2: All right, And I think that was sort of like
Speaker 2: in the seventies and then in the early two thousands
Speaker 2: is when the d'azzo process started to kind of fade
Speaker 2: away because you know, ammonia is not something you want
Speaker 2: to be working with a lot, and there are also
Speaker 2: regulations that increased in working with ammonia. And then you know,
Speaker 2: the digital revolution came along print technology things that were
Speaker 2: cheaper basically and smaller. All of a sudden, you didn't
Speaker 2: have to have some huge like plot printer in your
Speaker 2: office to make something like this, and it, you know,
Speaker 2: it did, like everything, it became cheaper and smaller and faster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the printers that can print out
Speaker 1: you know, like regulation size architectural planes or engineering plans,
Speaker 1: those became more affordable too, And they're basically just xeroxes.
Speaker 1: They're like printers essentially, just bigger size. The one thing
Speaker 1: I did see, Chuck that I didn't realize pen plotters.
Speaker 1: It's like a contraption originally where you have a pen
Speaker 1: and connected to that pen is a bunch of other pens,
Speaker 1: and so when you're drawing on one paper, the other
Speaker 1: pins are drawing on their own paper. So you're making
Speaker 1: copies like that as you're drawing in the first place.
Speaker 1: Those have come back and they're now computerized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, plotters are super cool. At a frien years ago
Speaker 2: that was a sign maker and he would, you know,
Speaker 2: these plotters would cut out these designs from the computer
Speaker 2: files and it's just really cool to see those things.
Speaker 2: You know, that automation at work, even for like a
Speaker 2: small business. You know, he was like a team of one.
Speaker 2: The other thing I wanted to mention too, is I
Speaker 2: think the d'azza's faded in sunlight. Oh okay, which it
Speaker 2: was fine for a little while because apparently it takes
Speaker 2: you know, like a few months, which was enough if
Speaker 2: you're you know, if it's like a house plan or something,
Speaker 2: you don't need it to last forever. But eventually they
Speaker 2: were like, you know, we should probably make something a
Speaker 2: little more permanent.
Speaker 1: That connects the dots for me, because I saw on
Speaker 1: some archivist website that they do not recommend using the
Speaker 1: d'atzo print because it isn't it's so impermanent. Now I
Speaker 1: have it, knowing's half the battle, as they say, Cyan Cian.
Speaker 1: Chuck said, Cyan, I follow it up with a Scian too,
Speaker 1: and everybody that means short stuff is out.
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