SPEAKER_05: It's Kate and Oliver Hudson! Host of the new podcast, Sibling Revelry. We started this
SPEAKER_05: show because you know what, no one talks about siblings and that dynamic. The siblings, they
SPEAKER_02: know each other better than anybody. Yes. You know, listen to Sibling Revelry on the
SPEAKER_05: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Dave's
SPEAKER_03: here in spirit. When you put us all together, you can call us the blue man group. It's best
I could come up with on short notice, Chuck. Yeah, this is the, I guess the conclusion of our
SPEAKER_01:
two-part series on colors, although we have done colors in the past. I know we did Indigo,
SPEAKER_01: and I think we did a short stuff on Haint Blue, right? Yes, and some other stuff has come up and
SPEAKER_03:
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
SPEAKER_01: about the color 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
SPEAKER_01:
whatever you're going to design, that blue is called Prussian Blue. Yeah, and I mean, if you go
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SPEAKER_03: and look up blueprints up to about the 50s, 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 1840s. In 1842, he figured out that Prussian Blue is photoreactive, 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. Okay.
SPEAKER_03:
If he is, he deserves to be there. If not, he deserves to be there. I agree. So, this is the
SPEAKER_01: process. It's called cyanotype, and it was what early photographers used. In fact, the very first published photography book was made with cyanotype.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that was, by the way, that was by Anna Atkins, whose 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae, get this, Chuck, colon, cyanotype impressions.
SPEAKER_01: Amazing. So, all of a sudden, architects and engineers were all over this stuff as well, because they realized, hey, if you can make a photograph using this cyanotype process,
you can make a copy of something, and we're really tired of redrawing everything over and over.
SPEAKER_03: Right, exactly. So, the process involves producing blue ferric ferricyanide. That's the chemical name for Prussian Blue, and you'll notice there's a lot of ferric stuff in there. That means it's made from iron salts, but it also has cyanide in it, and just from researching this episode, Chuck, I finally understood what cyan as a blue refers to. It's referring to cyanide.
SPEAKER_03: Did you know that already? No.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I thought that was pretty cool. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_03: 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 ferricyanide, these iron salts that make that, and you expose it to light,
then 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,
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, it's a gorgeous blue. Prussian Blue is fantastic.
SPEAKER_01: 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 19th century.
SPEAKER_01: That's right, that's why they named it that, right?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Do you want to take a break and then come back and talk about where Prussian Blue came from?
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
SPEAKER_02: Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on Sibling
SPEAKER_04: Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is Sibling Revelry? Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people
SPEAKER_04: along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_05: We're full blood siblings, the only full blood.
In our family. Well, not in the world.
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I mean, no, in the whole world. That's just it.
SPEAKER_04: Dive into family tales and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden.
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And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different
SPEAKER_05: siblings. And it's going to be an awesome season. It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of
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the ties that bind us. Listen to Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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SPEAKER_02: So, Prussian Blue finds its origins in the laboratory of an alchemist and a dye maker,
SPEAKER_03:
of all places. It's a pretty cool place for a new thing to be created, especially something as beautiful as Prussian Blue. And the alchemist was a guy named Johann Conrad Dippel. How would you say
in German, Chuck? That's probably right. Conrad or Conrad? I don't know, actually. Okay, well,
SPEAKER_03:
we'll just call him Mr. Dippel. He was the alchemist. He was the alchemist and the dye maker
SPEAKER_03: was a guy named Diesbach. We're just going with Mr. Diesbach 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 ingredients here or there, they ended up accidentally creating Prussian Blue. Yeah, exactly. I think the chemist was working on medicines like elixirs and things.
SPEAKER_01:
And Diesbach as a dye maker was great at making these dyes. And as the story goes, he was making
SPEAKER_01: a deep red dye one day when he borrowed some potash from his chemist friend. And that turned
SPEAKER_01: it into this wonderful, wonderful Prussian Blue. He went back in, hair Dippel, and said, I got to figure out what this stuff is. And he figured out the secret was that the potash had oxblood. And when he mixed that with iron sulfate, that caused this amazing blue to, what does it do? Does it unveil itself? Yeah. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
SPEAKER_03:
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 19th 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 cookies at Waterloo and defeated Napoleon. So if you were French, you didn't think very highly of the Prussians or their blue. If you were English, it was a term of endearment because
you were really grateful to the Prussians for coming and saving the day there.
SPEAKER_01: That's right. And it became just a popular color. Like artists loved using it. Printmakers 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. But I'm sure they were fine with it. But Herschel died before that blueprinting 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
SPEAKER_03: 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 abandoned is because it's a very labor intensive and time intensive process. Even if you're using kind of updated machinery and other processes came along that seemed 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 architectural plans look like today. They don't look blue anymore. And then
SPEAKER_03: shortly after that, they came up with zero graphic copiers, which you just today call a 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 escaping. 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
SPEAKER_03: proprietary eponym. Yeah. And I thought the diazo process created blue lines. Is that not true?
SPEAKER_01:
I think later on they figured out that if you use blue lines on the original, it makes a cleaner
SPEAKER_03: line on the copy. That was my take on it. All right. And I think that was sort of like in
SPEAKER_01:
the 70s. And then in the early 2000s is when the diazo process started to kind of fade away because
ammonia is not something you want to be working with a lot. And there were also regulations that increased in working with ammonia. And then the digital revolution came
SPEAKER_01: 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 just, you know, it did like everything. It became cheaper and smaller and faster. Yeah. And I
SPEAKER_03:
think the printers that can print out, you know, like regulation size architectural plans or engineering plans, those became more affordable too. And they're basically just Xeroxes. They're like printers, essentially just bigger size. 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 pens 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. I had a friend years
SPEAKER_01: ago that was a sign maker and he would, you know, these plotters would cut out these designs from
SPEAKER_01: 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 Diazzos faded in sunlight. Oh, okay. Which it was fine for a little
SPEAKER_01: 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 some dots
SPEAKER_03: for me because I saw on some archivist website that they do not recommend using the Diazzo print because it isn't, it's so impermanent. Now I have it. Knowing's half the battle as they say.
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Cyan. Cyan. Chuck said cyan. I followed up with a cyan too. And everybody, that means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio,
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visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
