The Serendipity of Blue

Depression, psychologists tell us, is not merely a neurological impairment; it is also a cognitive deficiency, a stubborn insistence upon seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. The sun rarely shines in the dust-bunny-ridden halls of the melancholic mind; the depressive goes about his business mechanically, grumpily, a veritable Scrooge, begrudging others their joy, asserting with the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, (without doubt the bleakest book in the Bible, so depressing that it should have its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Imagine, then, my shock, my delight, my childlike wonder, when I read about the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue! Full disclosure here: having been raised as a Scientist (i.e. Christian Scientist), my acquaintance with chemistry, and indeed all forms of lower case science, is minimal. I can safely assure my reader that I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to matters scientific. So I had to reread the article in the Science section of the New York Times at least five times before it stuck in my feeble hippocampus: in the course of an experiment in the chemistry lab at Oregon State University, which had to do with testing the properties of manganese oxides to determine whether they were both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time (you get a gold star if you know the difference), a graduate student happened to remove one of the pieces of manganese from a furnace—heated to a temperature so hot (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) it would scald the devil himself—and discovered that the material had turned bright blue. The student (not mentioned by name and not likely to get credit in the scientific journals) summoned his professor, and both were struck dumb as Paul on the road to Damascus: Lo and behold, the universe had made a whole new shade of blue!

But wait, it gets better: This new manganese blue was a better, safer, and more durable blue. Ever since the early Egyptians developed the first synthetic blue by grinding copper shavings with sand and potassium, the color has been difficult to create. Indeed blue was so rare in ancient times that the Greeks did not have a word for it. (Homer never refers to the sea as blue, only as “wine-dark.”) The Celts and Germans used woad, an herb of the mustard family, to create blue (and indeed the word blue is Germanic in origin); Indian peoples, since Neolithic times, have dyed with indigo; but both these blues tend to fade with time. The semi-precious stones of lapis lazuli, mined from mountains in the Far East, were often ground down to create a blue paste used in fine arts painting, but this brighter blue is costly. Cobalt blue, developed in France in the 1800s, was often carcinogenic. And Prussian blue, developed about the same time in Germany, releases the deadly chemical of cyanide. But this new manganese blue—featuring ions patterned in a trigonal bipyramidal coordination worthy of a Cubist painting—releases no evil carcinogens and will not fade with time. The new improved blue is expected to turn up in everything from inkjet printers to house paints.

And to think that the entire business was an accident, just as so many of the great scientific discoveries were accidents: Isaac Newton grasping the theory of gravity after being struck on the head by a falling apple; Henri Becquerel discovering X-rays after leaving his equipment in a drawer and noticing that a uranium rock had imprinted itself upon a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after failing to clean up his work area before going on vacation and noticing, when he returned, that a culture plate containing bacteria had developed a layer of mold which killed the bacteria around it.

Such serendipity is almost enough to make you believe in the prime mover, the author of all holy books, the maker of the periodic table himself.

Of course, if She exists, She’s got to be wearing blue!