Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Indigo

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why indigo is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 MaxFunDrive ends on March 28, 2025! Support our show now and get access to bonus content by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Indigo, known for being a color, famous for being the middle of the biv in the rainbow. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Indigo is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! Yes!

What is your relationship to or opinion of Indigo? Indigo is a really wonderful color and I like it. Yeah. I feel like I'm very much drawn towards the blue, the blues end of the spectrum, including Indigo. I actually am too, yeah. And also really fun topic from at Mike the Bitter on the Discord, really fun push for it and support from all sorts of folks.

Horseliker, Burrito, Arcblade, Courtjester, Elizabeth, XCAREX, Sandcaster, Jason Stash, just to name a few and Also other just thing to mention this episode comes out Basically one hour after the maximum fun drive ended So we're taping it before it ended and we'll have more to say about our gratitude to you But I it's really cool what you what you guys did and our community picks cool topics and makes the show happen and thank you It's great. Also, it's too late to support us. Don't even bother trying anymore. It's over. No, wait, no. You can't do it anymore. You can't support us anymore. It's done. It's over. No. Not the point. No. It's too late. It's too late. Unless Alex has something to say about how it's not too late, which I highly

doubt. I highly doubt. Katie chucked her headphones across the room as she started saying that. She was like... Katie out! Yeah. Just walk into an Indigo car and drive away on an Indigo road. Yeah. Indigo car and drive away on an Indigo road. Always a good time, but the perks of the maximum fun drive will roll out in the future, especially when we hit episode 250 pretty soon, like this summer. So you'll get special art for that if you're a supporter and thank you to folks who unlocked

that. That's going to be a lot of fun. I'm very excited for the special art. And also, yes, you can continue to support the show and the network, of course. You can be a subscriber anytime you want. And that really helps us. Max fun is sort of like the little special time where we sit at our little phone banks. It's actually a phone bank with a bunch of Alex's. It is. Just imagine a rose upon rose of Alex's chatting on the phone, you know, doing a phone bank drive. That's what Vexfun is.

Yeah, they're sort of like different Barbies. But before they made the Barbie lineup interesting, like it's just the exact same lady, but in different outfits and professions. Like there's a doctor Alex and sort of a business woman Alex, and what else? Right, veterinarian Alex with a tiny, a smaller Alex, that is the pet Alex version. Yeah, and then like one skipper.

Right. That's somehow a sibling of mine, yeah. Yeah, and then Alex's friend Katie And I have the worst clothes of any of the dolls. Oh Yeah, we made you count didn't we? Oh, no. Yeah So yeah in terms of indigo, I actually really love it I man I should have brought it so you could see it, but I I'm a bit of a cool person So I like to do needlepoint.

It's this fun new hobby where you do embroidery. I did sort of some, either an indigo plant flower or a lavender or a butterfly flower. It's kind of like, it's embroidery, so it's a little bit vague about, it's kind of an interpretation of plants, but yeah, I love that color. And so I often choose it in my clothing and decor, that kind of nice bluey, sometimes purpley color. And I just find it so soothing. I almost wonder if people's preferences in colors have any sort of relationship to like personalities, because I'm a very sleepy person and I like naps. And so I feel like Indigo, the fact

that I kind of like that side of the color spectrum, the blues, the purples, if that means that I'm just sort of a, like a nap, nap type Pokemon. Katie, go! And you just nap out of the ball, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just plop. I'm a Snorlax, I'm a Snorlax. Wait, is Snorlax that color? I think he kinda is.

Oh yeah. He is, he's like kind of a, well, he's a little more grayish, I guess, but yeah, he's like kind of a blueish color. Because also, we'll talk all about what this topic is, but in general, I find it to be maybe the most stiff color because I really never think about it except that it gets one of the seven rainbow spots.

That's huge. That's a really big platform, but the other six are much more prominent in my life. and I just kind of go around liking a lot of different blues and Don't think about indigo much even though it's kind of blue kind of purple and and very famous Roy G Biv it's the in Biv and I do appreciate that about it But yeah, I actually you know, I haven't really thought about it I don't necessarily like straight-up purple, but yeah, indigo. I do really love that color.

I am very drawn towards it and I wonder if the colors were drawn towards if there's anything maybe like how we're raised or colors you have at a young age or even just like I like to be soothed by things. So if I see like bright red, I'm like, this is too stressful. Bright red is a beautiful color, but this is too stimulating. I need a chill out color like Indigo. I guess we'll talk about Indigo and people can look at the red podcast logo and they can get an upper and a downer, you know, at once.

Yeah. I didn't realize I was like throwing shade at our own podcast logo Just like ah it's it's too. It's it's too frightening this this red Over-stimulated yeah, I show Katie a deep purple version of the logo to lure into the taping you know yeah Yeah, I'm like the opposite of a bowl thing like you have a indigo blanket So that I calm down enough to do the podcast But yeah, I love the color. I really do love the color. So I'm excited to talk about it Yeah, and you know most episodes we lead with numbers and statistics this week That's at the very end because there's a bunch of

I also showed Katie a red logo as I said that this this week there's like a bunch of takeaways first because Indigo's multiple things and all of their fundamentals are truly SIF and not known. Nobody really thinks about Indigo beyond that rainbow slot. So there's a lot to take away first and then we'll number at the end. Okay. Well, let's do it. Let's do it, Alex.

Starting with mega takeaway number one Indigo dye comes from the fermented leaves of a global set of plants You got me at fermentation man, I'm ready for this Yeah, like like pickled cucumbers like yeast, there's another fermentation episode. There's so many fermentation topics in the world. Life is fermentation, turns out. I know with purple, there's all sorts of weird dyeing techniques that involve a mollusk that's really hard to harvest and then human urine to set the color.

We have this privilege these days of being able to have all these synthetic dyes that make clothes really vibrant quite easily. But yeah, dye used to be, it's like when you just use a plant to dye something, it'd come out in a much more soft neutral tone. It wouldn't necessarily be really vibrant and bright, which I think is pretty nice.

And so probably all the like, all these like the the TikTok mommies who do the the beige parenting would freaking love the old timey dyes where it's like you have this bright, maybe a bright indigo plant and then you try to dye it, dye your clothes with it fresh, it just kind of looks a little gray. So people had to come up with fancy techniques to actually get the dye to Adhere to the fabric and look vibrant That's also relevant because we yeah We have that somewhat recent episode of sif about purple and there's a very old episode about blue and indigo is super separate from both Of them turns out what I also it's but it's like blue and purples, baby

both of them, turns out. What? I also- But it's like blue and purple's baby. The other thing that like a few of my sources claimed that people also made indigo from shellfish, but they're really just referring to that way of making purple with Merax shellfish from the Mediterranean. And like, if you just get a different tint, you could call that indigo. But the main indigo thing here comes from the interesting thing about the name of this topic.

Indigo refers to three different things. Indigo is a dye. It's also a whole set of plants that are used to produce the dye. It's also this color concept in the rainbow. But we get that from this dye, from these plants. So indigo's three things and really one thing. I'm realizing I'm sounding very Catholic Trinity as I say that, but here we are. So indigo is like, when I say red, I think people probably have a pretty clear version

of red in their head. But with indigo, I feel like it's a little more murky, like what that color exactly is. Because it's not just, it's not like navy blue and it's a little more murky like what that color exactly is because it's not just it's not like navy blue And it's not like grape purple Right, but it's also not just one color There's not like one shade of indigo There's multiple shades of it and it fall that usually falls somewhere in between like blue and purple But like there is kind of a variation of shades

Exactly, and that's because of a few different things. It's because of people just putting different amounts of dye and fabric to get different shades. And also because if you'd press me before researching, I really would have assumed indigo comes from just one plant, like just one place. It turns out the key thing is chemical compounds in the leaves of a bunch of different plants across the world, and mainly in warm places, but otherwise spread worldwide. So there's a lot of ways to get indigo dye. And there's one plant we mainly call indigo, but there's others too. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of... There's a lot to it. Yeah, it's, you know, like when we talk about colors, it's sort of, it's definitely a little

bit ineffable because it's a spectrum. And so it doesn't surprise me that you have like a bunch of different plants that could create that color because there's multiple ones. But yeah, it's a, there's all sorts of weird, like when we talk about specific definitions of say colors or words for colors or origins of it, there's a lot of interesting variations depending on culture. And it's just a tricky thing to nail down in our culture and our language because color is so much on a spectrum. Yeah.

And we'll really hit that in this takeaway and the next takeaway. And for this takeaway about the dye and fermenting plants, a bunch of key sources. One of them is a study published in the journal Science Advances in 2016 that was led by Jeffrey Split-Stoser, anthropology professor at the George Washington University, also citing an amazing essay for JSTOR Daily written by Surya Tapa Jha, visiting assistant professor of biology at Scripps College. And then also a book called The Fabric of Civilization, How Textiles Made the World. That's by nonfiction writer, Virginia Postral. Because yeah, indigo is a plant and a dye from the plant and the color we

associate with the dye. All three things. And it's multiple plants you said earlier. Yeah. Or is there just one? Yeah, okay. So there's multiple plants called indigo. The key thing it turns out is not any one species of plant. And also all the scientific terms we'll talk about are pretty much based on the name indigo. So they'll all kind of run together. But it's compound. We have named Indica Okay, something that is found in the leaves of a lot of different plants One key group of plants is a genus that we have named Indigo Farah Mm-hmm. Now there's 750 different plants in that genus and one in South Asia called Indigo Farah Tinktoria is

The plant we often simply call Indigo and it's a very strong source of Indican in its leaves. So this is something that would be fermented to make the dye? Yeah. And if you're using that or pretty much anything else, there's a pretty specific set of steps. You start by soaking the leaves in water, and the water makes the cells break down to release indican compounds along with an enzyme. And then that catalyzes a reaction that splits the indican into a sugar and into a reactive molecule called indoxyl.

Sugar. Again, everything's the same name. Indoxyl. This sounds really good. Can I drink it? Alex, what happens to me if I drink it? It's not great for you. Okay. It sort of depends a bit on the plant in terms of whether it's poisonous. You didn't say no though.

But don't probably. And also pretty much across the board, this process smells bad. Okay. It's like not that pleasant to be around. This is still not like a solid no. Cause I kind of want to indigo my tongue, see how that goes.

Quick, someone give Katie a blue popsicle. Just, we'll say that's it. We'll say that's it. Yeah. It's indipop, an indipop. Here we are. So then we've made a reactive molecule called endoxyl and sugar. Then endoxyl bonds with oxygen in the water forming another thing called indigotin.

Indigotin. That sounds like a science fiction made up compound in a sci-fi movie where we take over a planet of peaceful indigo aliens who only want to have sex with trees and get along. Yeah, we were all thinking of Avatar for sure. And people don't really need to closely follow this process, but the point is that indigoten is like a slurry at the bottom of this vat that you've been doing this in. Mm, slurry. You can't, you gotta stop, if you don't want me to drink it, you gotta stop using such

appetizing words like slurry. Indigoten, once you've made that, you can use it as paint or ink. Like you have a decorative paint type thing. The other thing you can do is do further steps to make it a dye for textiles, which people often do. To make it a dye, you add an alkaline substance, a basic substance. One example is wood, ashes, lots of simple stuff works for that. When you add that and you also add bacteria, then the bacteria consumes oxygen in the water

and leaves behind a useful clothing dye. And bacteria consuming oxygen is fermentation. That's just wild because you think about how we came upon, because I assume this is a relatively old recipe, right? We've been able to use this process for a while. So this was before our understanding of chemistry. So it was a lot of just like, all right, I got these leaves sort of in this water. Now I'm sort of doing this process and then adding ash to it and then also leaving it out so bacteria grows on it. A lot of

it must have been accidental and then remembering the circumstances in which this happened and then exploring that. To me, it's really wild to realize how smart humans have always been in terms of just finding random patterns of like, yeah, when I do this very specific leaf in this very specific way and then put some ash on it and allow it to sit out overnight, then I can make a cool hat. Exactly right. Yeah, this is one of the perfect examples of people just figuring out stuff before we knew chemistry. We think there was about a 6,000 year gap between people making indigo textile dyes

and writing up any of the chemistry. Wow. So do we know when the earliest indigo dyes were from? Yeah, and that study in Science Advances, it's sort of the latest find on when the earliest one might be because these kinds of plants are all over the world and a dig in modern Peru found a piece of fabric. It was at a place called the Huaca Prieta ceremonial mounds. And the mound is made of a lot of like gray dirt and sediment and stuff. And so people doing a dig there found a piece of cloth and they said, oh, this is kind of a gray cloth. But when they just kind of cleaned it up, they removed a bunch of sediment and found stripes

of indigo dye. Like not just dye, but a pattern. Wow. found stripes of indigo dye. Like not just dye but a pattern. Before that we thought the ancient Egyptians were the first to do it about 4,500 years ago, but that cloth is from 6,200 years ago in Peru. And was it perfectly sized for a cute adorable little bear who warms your heart with his just indomitable spirit and wholesomeness from darkest Peru. I know they were more advanced than cave paintings, but I'm imagining Paddington cave paintings. I'm really enjoying it.

I love both Peru and Paddington so much. So I'm happy to know that. I know Paddington's coat is kind of not exactly, it might be sort of on the Indigo spectrum, I guess, but it's a little more just plain blue. But man, I think he'd look good in Indigo. He would. And especially in the next takeaway, we'll talk about how and why Indigo became a fuzzy concept. Yeah. Because it's not just one specific blue or purple.

Yes. Yeah. It was then in 1791 AD, a French chemist named Bertolet published some of the first scientific describing oxygen kind of description of how making indigo dye works. But 6,000 years earlier or earlier than that, people figured out how to do it. Wow. With many of the plants that have this indican compound, Virginia Postral says people probably just figured it out through natural observation of the plant living.

One imagined version of it is she says, someone sees indigo leaves that turned blue in an early frost or noticed the striking colors produced when a summer storm ripped leaves off an indigo bearing plant and blew them into the wet remains of a wood fire." Wow. That's one of many ways someone many thousands of years ago in many locations could have just figured out indigo dye. It's just green leaves, right? The leaves themselves are not blue and so it wouldn't be like a natural association

of like, ah, blue leaves. I make it into blue clothing. Like someone had to notice this leaf, like tear off combined with water and enter some ash and then see this bright blue color, not only see it, but think like, Hey, I can recreate that and figure out how the steps to like recreate is just so impressive. I love humanity. Right. Once you like get the leaves wet or stress them in some way, then they start to give up this indigo can and these colors that they have. People just figured it out. So you tell the leaves, you have 112 unread emails and the leaves are like, ah, and then

they give you some indigo dye. You said to stress them. Fully, every day for two weeks I've gotten a fake text message from the New York system of road tolls and I keep falling for it for a second. I'm like, oh, I owe them. And then it's like tap the craziest URL you've ever seen to pay. I'm like, okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Did you like like a squid? Did you sort of a generated a plume of ink like a frightened squid? That's what I do when I get scary texts or spam.

Yeah. And yeah, and that last step when humans make this is to just add bacteria. And people did it without understanding, you know, single cell life or whatever. Virginia Postral cites a researcher who says, we know of at least 30 different food items that people added to a vat of this simmered, wet and indigo leaves because the food items have bacteria on them and then the bacteria proceeds to do fermentation. Examples are everything from rhubarb juice to sesame oil to rotten meat. Because nobody's going to eat the indigo, so it doesn't have to be food safe.

Man, you keep wetting my appetite this episode, Alex. Rotting meat in an indigo dye. That sounds, man, I'd love to have a beautiful shirt that smells a little bit like old jerky. Oh yeah. I'm glad the smells are only at the making it stage but it's really smelly it seems like across the board yeah. But the smell goes away once you've like dyed it and washed it out I assume. Yeah especially usually the last step of making the dye is just removing the gross fermentation source but also the old leaves like it's kind of like tea you take the leaves out after. Wait, we're supposed to do that?

I've been eating them bags. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I was gonna tell you, you seem full of fiber. So I guess that makes sense. Don't know how I would know someone is full of fiber. I am blocked up more than a New York gridlock. Just full of dry tea leaves. We have congestion pricing now.

It's fixed. Hey. Anyway. Hey. So OK, so you take this kind of disgusting tea, and then you remove all the gross parts, and now you're left with a beautiful dye. Yeah, if you proceed beyond the paint or ink stage and make dye, then that dye through

something called a mordant, it just binds to textiles well, especially cotton and other cloth. Can you elaborate more what a mordant, this is a word I've never heard before. Yeah, Virginia Postal says it's something that quote unquote bites into the material of the textile. And so the long and short of it is that it makes it a really strong dye. So also ancient people said this is one of the longest lasting and brightest dyes we have.

That's why we really value it and we'll do all this horrible fermentation bat stuff. And there are all these like South Asian plants and the indigo phara genus that do it. Also a lot of people put those plants in the ground because they are legumes. They're related to peas and beans and stuff and they fix nitrogen in the soil so they were part of some crop rotation in some places. So we would we would eat the plant if we didn't turn it into dye? No it didn't make anything to eat but but it's in the legume family. And so it would put nitrogen back in the soil.

I see. So we knew that by planting it, it would fertilize the soil? Yeah. And then food crops would go in before and after that. Yeah. I see. That's really interesting. And then there's a whole other set of many other plants with indican in their leaves

that are not very related to those. They're not legumes, they're just different. There's one called persicaria tinctoria. It's a kind of buckwheat plant, and it's called the common name Japanese indigo because it's common there. Then there's sibistax anticyphilitica. I love that one. That sounds good.

Yeah, I couldn't find whether it's related to syphilis or not, but it's a South American ... Well, it sure sounds like it. And it's a South American shrub, which locals call yangua. That also has the chemical compounds you need for indigo. And then there's also Asatis tinctoria. That's a kind of mustard plants that's especially in Europe and kind of north of where most other indigo making plants are. Its common name is woad.

It's something that if people like ancient warfare or whatever they might know, Celtic warriors painted themselves with it. And it's basically a faint, not very concentrated, but still workable source of the same indigo stuff. So, like, that's what Braveheart would be smearing on his face? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool. And these all have Indocan, the same molecule in them? Yeah, exactly. And so, we think it was probably parallel invented all over the world. Because it turns out it's hard to make, but there is also a plentiful range of species that you can get the plant stuff from. Again, this is like, it's so amazing because it's not like one genius figured out how to make this die.

A bunch of people all over the world We're figuring this out because you know humanity can be pretty smart when it comes to making Our looks real fresh getting that drip going and it was so much more exciting than most other dyes we had yeah Yeah, so we're we basically just keep finding new older examples of it the The dye work in Peru was 6,200 years old. Egyptians started doing it at least 4,500 years ago. In ancient China, people did it at least 3,000 years ago. People in Mayan cities found a way to mix Indican rich plant leaves with a kind of clay in order to make indigo paints for sculptures and pottery and murals. There's also the Tuareg people in the Sahara regions of Africa. They have a cultural ceremony where young boys get an indigo

dyed head scarf to indicate that they're beginning the transition to manhood. Like people could make this all over. So they parallel invented it. And also there's all sorts of different culture and art around it. You know, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I think also having a real drippy style is also the mother of invention, having a real fresh fit. I mean, an indigo headscarf sounds great. I do think it is in all seriousness really significant that humans over, you know, basically our entire history is like, not only do I like pretty stuff, but I want to manipulate the stuff so that I can wear it. And that's, you know, we're almost the only animal that does that. Yeah.

And yeah, we really love to with any nice color. When I say almost the only animal, it's because there are some animals that like to decorate themselves like bearded vultures, which like to roll around in mineral rich dirt to kind of give them a reddish blush. So there are some animals, but none of them go to nearly the trouble to be drippy in six styles as human beings. I want to chant USA but for everybody. Human beings, human beings. Yeah.

And so that's like the beginning of this dye. And then the dye and the plants and the basic color all got named indigo and the next takeaway is into the rainbow of it because takeaway number two Isaac Newton invented the concept of indigo and the rainbow because Newton believed in magical numerology. Ooh, see now, this is a fella, this OCD girl can get behind. I see you Isaac Newton, don't tell me he didn't have OCD, he had all the markers of it, being like really afraid things were gonna fall on his head,

being obsessed with numbers and patterns. So yeah. Yeah, he was really into numerology and especially book of Revelation numerology. He was very into the occult and the Bible and magic and also alchemy kind of separately. But because Newton was obsessed with the number seven, he decided that the rainbow has seven colors in it and reached for indigo as one of them. I do love sort of very dumb reasons for things that just completely change our culture.

Yeah, this dominated at least the United States and other places I'm familiar with. It seems like Britain and America really pushed Isaac Newton as being Right about everything partly because he was brilliant. Like he advanced so many things. He is pretty smart. I Never really sit and think about why there are seven colors in the rainbow because in actuality there's Not an infinite number of colors, but it's a whole bunch of different wavelengths of visible light to people. And you can kind of demarcate which colors are which, however you want. Each color is a concept on top of being a real thing. Yes, exactly.

But also if we didn't have Indigo, it'd be Roy G. Biv, which is way worse than Roy G. Biv. ROYGBIV, which is way worse than ROYGBIV. Yeah, the first demarcation was just five colors. And also a bunch of key sources here, including the Cabinet's blog of the University of Oxford, other resources from the Oxford University Press, and then the Philadelphia Science History Institute and New Scientist magazine. They talk about how two early researchers of light and optics and color were Isaac Newton and also a contemporary named Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle is known for a scientific principle called Boyle's Law and a bunch of other stuff. He was an Irish-British scientist. And in 1664, Robert Boyle put light from the sun through a prism and saw the resulting spectrum

Ah, and so he made a really cool t-shirt Then later he made an album called animals yeah, he made a besides poster of ladies backs that is famous in colleges. What else? It's Pink Floyd. It's funny that pink is not really listed in this, even though it's probably in there. I don't know. Pink is definitely in the rainbow. Yes, pink is in the rainbow for sure. And so when Boyle in 1664, Boyle publishes his finding of, hey, I put sunlight through a prism, I got a whole spectrum. And to me, there are five colors. In my just like schema, my decision making about what I see, there is red, yellow, green,

blue, purple. Okay. So, RYGBP, that's it. That's unsatisfying. But yeah, exactly. Like what you were saying earlier with like, there's like sort of a near infinite number of colors, you could sort of like, basically there's any number of, I mean, it's not infinite what we can see

because like our eyes aren't good enough to see the full wavelength spectrum of the universe. But like essentially like, there's so many different wavelengths that where you go from like say, blue to violet or orange to yellow, there's so many different little steps between them that you could name, enumerate many, many, many different colors. But whether or not you do that kind of depends on your perspective, probably also depends on your own eyeballs. We all might see color a little differently based on our, you know, how many rods and

cones you got back there. And so, yeah, like, and also different cultures have sort of different concepts of how many colors there are or which colors are what exactly. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like the long ago blue episode, we talk about some languages having multiple more separate categories of blue. And probably part of why Boyle didn't list orange is that orange was a relatively new concept in Europe in the 1600s.

On the past, if about orange, we talk about that kind of arriving in the 1500s as a separate thing and not something else that they called yellow-red or giallo-red or like they hadn't demarcated orange as like its own category. It was just sort of the fuzzy middle between red and yellow for a long time. And a really good fuzzy navel. And partly they like got the fruit and they were like, oh this deserves a crayon. This is this is great Like this deserves a crayon. Amazing.

1600s, yeah When I was a kid Crayola kind of told me what the important ones are and they didn't give indigo a crayon They gave it to the other six rainbow colors and black and brown. Well, that's cuz you... And the basic eight. That's cuz you never had access to the like 24 pack the super box this yeah box I It's not that my mom bought it for me

But I think I like I went was in a classroom where some teacher had the super box and I got to use it I was like I'm the queen of color kingdom here. And I'm pretty sure they had indigo in there. Yeah, it's definitely in the expanded set, yeah. But that's kind of our ranking of it, you know? Yeah, they had like sunset and, you know. Brantziana shirt, yeah. Hamburger on the ground. I think there was macaroni and cheese maybe?

Yeah. Like that was a crayon? Anyway. That was a crayon, and I definitely ate that one. I do remember eating crayons as a child. I was very sort of adventurous when it came to eating colorful things as a kid. So if I saw like an Indigo crayon, I'm like, well, that's a food color. So it goes in my mouth. And so Boyle is like not wrong and not right.

He just felt five colors were the most significant parts of this spectrum he was seeing through a prism. And Newton also gets his own prism. He also makes lots of further discoveries about light and color and human vision. And so a lot of people kind of focus on his schema for this. And his pitch for the number of main colors is two more colors than Boyle. He adds orange and he adds indigo. Hmm. I mean, also Newton had better branding because his name is associated with Fig Newton's

and Boyle is associated with Boyle's. So, you know, it's kind of makes sense there. All the people arguing for boils thing have like a lot of stuff on their face and you're like, it's okay, but are you okay? I don't know. And the thing is Newton reached for those colors for pretty non-scientific reasons. Like I said, at the top of the takeaway, it was magical numerology. Newton was obsessed with the number seven. In an essay about theology, he argued that the book of Revelation proves the significance of seven because of the numbers of trumpets and also vials and also thunders described in the apocalypse. numbers of trumpets and also vials and also thunders described in the apocalypse. And then he proceeded to also say the world around us proves the power of seven because

there are seven natural notes in the Western musical scale. There are seven days in the calendar's week and there are seven planets in the solar system. Yeah. And all the things like with the notes and the scale and also days in the week, that's completely like not, you know, it's completely objective. Right, those are both objective and not Eurocentric. And then the other one is seven planets in the solar system, which he was kind of guessing at.

We hadn't discovered seven yet. And also, even if you leave off Pluto, we think there's eight now. So he was just wrong about that, but it's fine. What an idiot. What a stupid, dumb idiot that Newton was. Yeah, and he had another essay where he said that the powerful number of 666 that we perceive to be the mark of the beast in the book of Revelation, Newton said that proved that the current pope was the antichrist.

Yeah, there you go, buddy. He had a lot of wild swings on top of inventing calculus and doing a lot of real stuff. He would have the biggest podcast in the world now. If he was alive today, he would be massively popular. Right, because none of those guys also invented calculus. They're just idiots. Right, because none of those guys also invented calculus. Like they're just idiots. Right. It's true though, I think like because he'd be too busy inventing calculus, like he'd kind of have to ditch that to have like the most popular podcast in the world. It's true calculus is probably woke because it

makes sense. It's too woke because integrals, you want us to integrate? That sounds like DEI to me. And so, yeah, so Newton, he made sure to reach for two more colors because he believes seven is important and he wanted to fulfill his own belief about it. And yeah, like I said, orange had kind of started to catch on in Europe about a century before that, so he adds orange. We'll talk in the next takeaway about indigo dyes and how they reached Europe. That was a relatively recent boom since the 1400s.

It had been there before too. He latched on to fresh colors for his other two. Because he was fixated on that, that's why we bothered to include Indigo in our mental picture of a rainbow. Yeah, I mean, it is because it is like it's essentially between blue and violet, right? So yeah, we didn't we don't necessarily need it there or we could have had two things between there or nothing. It's extremely subjective what we decide to point out on the spectrum of like, there we go, that's a color.

Exactly. And so yeah, nobody's right or wrong. And we just have adopted Newton's version, which it turns out comes from a weird place. It's great. Comes from magic. Magic. Yeah, folks, that's two giant takeaways. We have a few more and some numbers coming up after this quick break. Folks, I want to talk to you about accounting. And I know you've been hearing Maximum Fun Drive messages, which are in a way all about accounting because the generosity of listeners is the only way our podcast or any podcast on Maximum Fun can exist.

As we do that, we also try to improve those numbers by finding a few organizations or sponsors that actually do make sense and would actually be a good idea for people. And the one we've found for this week is UNC Keenan-Flagler Business School and their Master of Accounting program. Because again, accounting, if you thrive on diving into the details, your curiosity makes you a great fit for a career in accounting. No matter the state of the job market, every industry needs accountants, and accountants are always in demand.

UNC Keenan-Flagler offers one of the top ranked online Master of Accounting degrees. Again, it's the University of North Carolina, the real place, and it's online, so you don't have to be near Chapel Hill, North Carolina to do it. If you've been thinking of switching industries, if you want to set yourself up for a lifelong career,

whatever the reason, pick UNC Keenan-Flagler. Pick the program with proven ROI and a 98% job placement rate 98 98 percent You could be a tar heel in less than one year learn more at accounting.unc.edu Again, that website is accounting.unc.edu And we're back. And there's so much more movement of Indigo to talk about because take away number three, the name Indigo comes from a Greek version of a Sanskrit name for a river. Huh.

Go on I know that was a little long though like the name the word and the go it's the Greek version of a Sanskrit name For a river specifically the river Indus the Indus River. Okay. Why don't you just say the Indus River? For drama basically Why don't you just say the Indus River? For drama, basically. That river runs through a few countries, including India and Pakistan. It turns out the word indigo and the name India come from a word for that river. Oh, okay.

It's kind of all the same origin. All right. So was this river an indigo color? Is this why we've got this connection? No. And two key sources here, there's a book called Blue, the History of a Color by Michel Pastereau, professor emeritus at the Practical School of Advanced Studies of the Sorbonne. And the other book is The Secret History of Color by journalist Cassia St. Clair. That's been helpful on a lot of different sifts about colors. But the name Indigo, it comes from a few different re-translations of a word in Sanskrit because the Indus River runs through multiple countries. It

starts in either Tibet or China. It runs through a few disputed territories. But around 3,500 years ago, people near that river developed the Sanskrit language. They used it to write a set of poems and hymns called the Vedas and also just to do everyday writing and speaking. And they named this large river Sindhu. And the transliteration is S-I-N-D-H-U, Sindhu. That word has really lasted. The Urdu language, the main language of Pakistan, they still call the river Sindh without the U. So that really stuck around, but some other people changed it a lot.

So it went from Sindhu to Indhu. Yeah, it went two ways. The key alterations came from the Greeks and the Persians because the Persians conquered the Greeks and kind of ran them for a while. And some of the first Greek people to visit what's now the Indus River were like Persian employees basically. And the Sanskrit word Sindhu got changed by the Persians. They're not getting paid to write down S's.

That's like almost what happened. So the Sanskrit word Sindhu, the Persians pronounced it in a way that's more like Hindu. That's where we get the beginning of the word Hindu for those people, culture, faith, language, everything. Whoa. That's wild. Yeah, yeah. I never made that connection between Indigo and India, Hindu, and dust river. Yeah, it's all various languages and it's the same word origin. And then the Greeks received the word Hindu from the Persians. And as the ancient Greek language developed, people often did

not write or say an H sound so much. Who's got the time? Exactly. They're busy almost founding democracy in Athens, but not really. And also the name of Athens didn't have an H so much back in the day. It's kind of weird. Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like cockney people. They've got a lot to do. They've got a lot of chimneys to sweep, so they don't have time for Hs. It's like, you know, it's like cockney people. They've got a lot to do. They've got a lot of chimneys to sweep. So they don't have time for H's. It's like, you have any, you have any abs of, of a am, you have a, a fa am, cause like the H, it takes time.

It's, we got, we got a lot, we got a lot of chimneys to sweep. And the Greeks knew this as well. They, they had a lot of chimneys to sweep and the Greeks knew this as well. They had a lot of volcanoes to avoid. I really like the musical My Fair Lady version of Ancient Greece. That's great. Wait, Alex, hang on. I can't let that go because My Fair Lady is a take on an ancient Greek myth, which is- Oh, you're right. Yeah. Hey.

Which is modern Pygmalion, which is the Greek myth of the sculptor sculpting a lady out of marble. And he's really sad because he finds the sculpture he did incredibly hot and he's super horny for his sculpture. And he's like basically wasting away because he's like just so thirsty for his own sculpture

and a god who's probably equally as horny as this guy is like, I pity you brother because I too get really horny for inanimate objects. So then he brings the Pygmalion sculpture to life. Yeah, he can barely sweep this ancient Greek chimney. He's so horny. Right. Yeah, that's true. It's as Al. Yeah. Yeah. So Sanskrit

Sindhu becomes Persian Hindu, becomes Greek Indus or Indus because the Greeks dropped the H off the front. And then also they make a lot of more contact with the region in the 320s BC when Alexander the Great marches his army in there. Because by the 320s BC, the Greeks are conquering the Persians, not the other way around. Technically the Macedonians, but still. Once it becomes a military objective and so on, the Greeks start saying, okay, that's the Indus River. We're going to call it that. And we're going to call just the whole subcontinent of peoples and stuff that's east of it also

Indus. Like, that's east of it, also Indus. That's all kind of Indus to us. And then- The Indus people were like, well, that's all Greek to us. Yeah. And later on, partly thanks to the British, that place gets called India. Because of this progression of how the Greeks thought about a river that they're mispronouncing the name of, which the Persians mispronouncing the name of,

which the Persians mispronounced the name of. Right. It's just a game of telephone. Yeah. Except with conquest. And then the other link is while the Greeks are conquering and so on, they also say, okay, trade, money, what do we do? And they decide the coolest thing by far that's being made in that Indus River area is this amazing purpleish bluish dye from plant leaves. Especially that Indigofera tinctoria species that's particularly good for Indicon. Wow, okay. So they love this dye and so they just name the dye after the region. Yeah, exactly. So they stamp the dye with a very similar name

of Indikon, is the Greek writing of it. And it's pretty much become Indigo through some other languages. And it was also a very easy to trade luxury good, because it's always been possible to make a batch of that dye and then dehydrate it and turn it into a very lightweight powdery cake.

And so it's like incredibly valuable per pound and easy to transport the vast distance from India to Greece. So now it's a cake and you're still saying I shouldn't eat it. Getting a lot of mixed messages on this episode. Yeah, and because it's so far away from India to Greece, Indigo is really the only thing worth bringing, and that's another reason that kind of cements the name being for that. And then also this pattern gets repeated about a thousand years later when first Turkish traders in the 1100s and then Portuguese sailors in the 1400s start bringing India and Indigo to Europe. And then they also say, oh, the thing from India. Great.

I mean, that makes sense. I guess it's I just I never made that connection. I didn't know those words were related at all. Yeah, it also turns out there's a modern discount airline in the country of India called Indigo. Oh, wow. Indigo logos and stuff, you know? They've like leaned into it a little bit. It's fun. Yeah.

But yeah, it all wraps around. Yeah. Time is a donut, a delicious donut with blueberry frosting. That's Indigo! Yeah. And so that's where the name of all of these things comes from and Europe so associated indigo with India that there was a recent historical inaccuracy believing that only India invented it and only in the last few decades with new digs we've discovered it

was probably parallel invented all over. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. Yeah, and so that gets us into a pretty short numbers section for the episode. We have numbers at last. All right, we've finally gotten the numbers guys and they're not looking good. We're in the red. We want to be in the indigo, but we're in the red. This week that's in a segment called I'm too sexy for my stats too sexy for my stats means going to average

Thank you that the name was submitted by BMW 1138 on the discord new name for this every week, please make a missillian wagon as possible submit the discord or sip out of gmail.com I have such an association with that song with Incino Man with Brendan Fraser. Yeah, it really works there. It's very from that decade or so. And the first of a few numbers is 1897, the year 1897. That is the year when a chemist named Adolf von Baer developed synthetic indigo dye. It turns out that indigo was one of the most difficult dyes to synthesize, just because

the real kind is so vibrant. Artificial colorfast dye came around in 1856 through an accident trying to do other chemistry. They generated a color that they named Mauve. And then from there, magenta and a lot of other blues, purples, and then other colors. But people kept saying, oh, this attempt at indigo is like, okay, but I still like the natural kind. I still like the plants. It's just that great.

And then a German pharmaceutical giant company named BASF funneled about 20 million German marks into R&D. After about 30 years of research, Ed El Fombe hit on a formula that looked right to the public. They finally started marketing pure indigo synthetic dye and made the money back. It's such a powerful natural color. It was hard to match up to synthetically. Yeah, I mean, it's also again, like it's wild how much how incredibly determined people are in getting the drippiest styles.

I mean, like investing so much into this synthetic dye. And then, of course, like over so many thousands of years, like just being really into the drip. I really and I'm not saying this in a bad way I think it's great. Yeah. Like we should be we should always have our innovation sort of focused on looking very fly and very fresh. Right it's a nice field to focus on and the other other, I think, good thing about it is making indigo dye is pretty smelly and unpleasant. And people still do make the plant kind to this day, but also the synthetic kind freed a lot of farmers to say maybe other crops and freed a lot of people in industry to say maybe other products. This is vile to deal

with. It's not horrible for you, but it's just not good as an experience. Is making the synthetic version less smelly and gross? If you do it right. Okay. Because yeah, also factories of the turn of the century were horrible, so that wasn't maybe better. Yeah, I was going to say, how many of these factories had tiny children in the indigo

vats? Another dark topic. The next number is 1524. Uh oh. 1524. That is when the Spanish military and government pretty much invented indigo plantations worked by enslaved labor. Oh boy.

There's a lot of horrible human slavery involved in the age of imperialism version of growing indigo. The Europeans coined that way of doing it instead of local farming and paying people. Yeah. I do not approve of this method of looking fresh and fly. There's nothing fly about slavery, folks. Hot take of the year. Another brave stance by our podcast.

I'm so brave, so incredibly brave. The first operation where Europeans did this was the Spanish conquered what's now Guatemala a few years after Cortez invaded the Triple Alliance and the Mexica lands in what's now Mexico, another Spanish force conquered Mayan people to create a new Guatemala colony. And the Spanish bothered to make indigo plantations not because they couldn't get indigo, but because the Portuguese were making all the money off indigo. The Portuguese did horrible colonial ports in the west coast of what's now India and then imported it to Europe. And so the

Spanish said, we'll use enslaved people in the Americas to make our own Indigo and our own money. We have Indigo, but we want the money. Right, right. Like, hey, look at Portugal being a horrible imperialist. We can do that even better. Yeah. And then the British and French said that. And so the British and French set up indigo plantations across their Caribbean territories. And then some of the most notorious were English plantations in what's now South Carolina. Apparently around the year 1740, a few decades before the American Revolution, South Carolina was the most lucrative of the

13 British colonies entirely because of indigo plantations and also rice plantations. So people were really wild about this color so much so that we would just, did we base a lot of sort of the slave trade on it? Yeah, like I think people think of tobacco and cotton and a few other crops more, but indigo is a massive part of that horrible triangle trade. And apparently the British started nicknaming indigo blue gold because those dehydrated cakes sold for huge amounts of money per pound. Right.

Right. The next stages of the history, some positive things happen. The simplest one is basically people stop enslaving people to grow indigo as they stop enslaving people in general. The British Empire begins to outlaw it in the 1830s. The United States keeps that British practice going until the 1860s. But then the other wild thing here, the last number is 1859. Because 1859 was the start of a labor action called the Indigo Revolt, which was in British India.

So back to India. Indigo to the Poles. No? Why not? I choose you, snore Katie, and then you snore to the polls. Why not just Indigo to the polls instead of this revolt business? The very maniacally capitalist thing the British Empire does is, again, most of these European countries are just making Indigo plantations so they can get more of the profits.

They all have access to Indigo if they pay for it. Right, right. But before the American Revolution, Britain started getting most of its indigo from South Carolina. They had a few Caribbean spots too, but mostly South Carolina. And then when the American Revolution starts, Britain, they say, now that we can't exploit South Carolina so much, let's exploit South Asia. And so what they do is they take what's now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, it's called a British Raj that's formed after the British East India Company does horrible corporate stuff. In the new British Raj, the British government creates something called the Niel system.

That doesn't sound good. Yeah, Neel, if you transliterate it, it's spelled N-E-E-L. Neel is the Bengali word for the color blue. Oh, I thought that was gonna be just some sort of like, hey, we're subjugating you to Neel system. Yeah, it is that too. Oh, okay. What they say is, purely for our own profits, poor Indian farmers, you can either starve

or sign a bad contract. Well? You can either grow indigo or pay a massive financial penalty, and then you're required to sell your indigo just to us at a huge discount. And the response to that is our last takeaway number four. A few indigo farmers helped create the modern concept of nonviolent protest. Wow. This is the origin of a lot of good nonviolent social change and activism is the actions of indigo farmers resisting the Neel system in 1859

and 1860? I mean, that just sounds very cool. Like they're resisting the Neel system, which I know it's not K-N-E-E-L, but it sounds that way. They're resisting the Neel system and they're indigo farmers. It's got a very cool sounding setup and it also seems like it is a very important historical event. It is, yeah. Like it's not the only place people have resisted non-violently, but it was a landmark one because this, the system's obviously exploitative and horrible. And in 1859, two brothers named Bishnucharan Biswas and Digambar Biswas begin a protest against the system. Initially it's violence.

They burn down indigo depots. They attack people who are bosses of it. And the farmers from there gather just so many people who are interested in participating, and it shifts into nonviolence. They find that they just have the numbers to refuse to grow indigo or refuse to meet the contract demands for the sale of it. They make petitions with thousands of signatures. They coordinate protests. A lot of them tell the British they'd rather just be beggars than grow indigo. It like snowballs into being non-violent and

being kind of a new thing. Even the start of it makes sense, right? If your choices are just continue to be subjugated under slavery or like set fire to the place where you are basically being enslaved, like I understand that. But then, yeah, once they have the momentum and the numbers, being able to convert that to a nonviolent resistance is really incredible, very inspiring. It is, and they'd also had the example of two years earlier, 1857,

there was a different violent rebellion against the British, and that just got crushed with violence and it was just tragic and they were able to just gather so many poor farmers all on the same page sticking with each other having each other's back that it forced change. That's wonderful. Great thing to kind of remember in times like these, for no particular reason. Right, especially using economics to do it. Yeah. And so as soon as 1860, after more than a year of sustained protests by Indian farmers,

the British government has to promise change. They commissioned and publish a fact-finding report. The report was actually straight up and honest. It found it was a fundamentally coercive and fraudulent system. There was a prominent quote from a British magistrate named E.W.L. Tower who testified, quote, not a chest of indigo reached England without being stained with human blood, end quote. This was not a fakey report. For some reason, somebody in the British government was really kind and honest about it for what it is. Yeah.

And so from there, the British government passed the Indigo Commission Act of 1860 to ban the Neil system. And it did mostly change the system, and then there were still people trying to exploit the farmers. But that event laid the groundwork for future nonviolent resistance in India. As I researched this, I found some sources that falsely claimed Gandhi participated in the 1859 Indigo Revolt. He was born in 1869, so he did not. I see. But he and others learned from this and there was this cultural new thing of, oh, if all of us work together, we can change things without attacking and killing people. Yeah. And also one of Gandhi's first protest actions supported indigo farmers in the Champaran

district of Bihar in the year 1917. So the indigo farmers helped lead to people like Gandhi, who helped lead to everybody from Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela. They really made the whole world better in all sorts of ways. That's incredible. Yeah, and also just that I think it really is very revealing too, where it's like all of this stuff about like, hey, you're so worthless that we're gonna treat you like slaves, not pay you, et cetera. But then when everyone who's put in that position

is just like stops working, resists that whole economic system, collapses so thoroughly, it kind of proves that, no, these people are not worthless, right? Like, in fact, they are the ones completely holding up the wealthy, so yeah, that is punk rock, man. I love it. Right, it's just really cool.

The British had less power than they claimed to, but only because Indian people stuck with each other. It's like that classic movie, A Bug's Life, where all the ants stand up to the grasshoppers. I mean it is, yeah that's true. I am learned. I'm cultured. It's honestly a good pull. It's a similar plot, yeah.

Because of the farming and the unfair system. Yeah, yeah. Right. And it's like them unfair system. Yeah, yeah. Right. And it's like them all standing up together, man. Bugs Life was woke. We got to cancel it. Yeah, it turns out most authentically vibrant artists woke. I wonder if that means anything.

Bugs Life was woke. When you think about it, they had the femme-presenting ladybug who still identified as he, him. They had a circus group being very different, but then showing that they are great, great bugs. You have strong- Right, it's like cabaret or something. Yeah. Yeah. You have strong female leaders. You have workers' rights, unions, and yeah, no. Great movie. Counterpoint, the movie Ants has the voice of Woody Allen. Oh God.

Maybe watch that instead, because it's much worse. It's also really, like the movie, I mean actually both The Bug's bugs life and ants have trouble depicting Ant colonies correctly, but at least in a bugs life. It's less flagrant in ants It's like all the soldier ants are like these big brawny men and then like all the women are sort of like these little scrawny ants and it's like Yeah biology here. No No, all the all the ants that do the work are mostly females.

So, yeah. Right, but like the main leader is some sort of royal figure who's male in an ant colony, right? Like an ant king, that's definitely the trope I know. Yeah. Anyway, Indigo Farmers did it. They really have done it. Oh, jeez.

Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, indigo dye comes from the fermented leaves of a global set of plants. Within that we talked about indigo being three things all at once. It is a dye, it is a set of plants that can generate that dye, and it is a color concept. Takeaway number two, Isaac Newton invented the concept that indigo is a color of the

rainbow because Newton believed the number seven had magical Bible numerology powers. Takeaway number three, the name indigo comes from a Greek version of a Sanskrit name for the Indus River, and also the whole Greek perspective on that dye. Then we plug just a few numbers into this episode about the beginning of synthesizing the color indigo as a dye, also the beginning of enslaving people to produce that dye, and then we round it off with takeaway number four, a few indigo farmers helped create the modern concept of nonviolent protests and social change. Those are the many takeaways this week.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximumfund.org. Again, we just did the 2025 Maximum Fund Drive. Also members are the reason this podcast exists. So no matter when you start supporting the show, you start getting a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. Your support also gets you every bonus show we've ever made. This week's bonus show is particularly rich. It is the unique American indigo traditions of Haint Blue and Levi's jeans. The two most amazing

American cultural uses of indigo. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, including our Inspectors Inspectors TV recap podcast. And there's catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. All of that is special audio just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a miniature library about Indigo. I leaned on the book The Fabric of Civilization, How Textiles Made the World by award-winning nonfiction writer

Virginia Postral. Also the book The Secret Lives of Color by journalist and design expert Cassia St. Clair. Also the book Blue, the History of a Color that is by Michelle Pastoreau, professor emeritus at the Practical School of Advanced Studies of the Sorbonne. There's also an amazing essay we cited that was written for JSTOR Daily by Surya Thapa Jha, visiting assistant professor of biology at Scripps College, and then tons of news coverage of archaeology, especially the oldest indigo dyes in the world, and a study published in the journal Science Advances in 2016. They think they found the oldest one in Peru.

That says by a team led by Jeffrey Split-Stoser, anthropology professor at the George Washington University. On top of those many sources, that page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people,

Skatigok people and others. Also, KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode?

Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 181 that's about the topic of scales, like scales for weighing. Fun fact, that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where there's a rigged, bad weighing scale for finding out if someone's a witch, that pretty much happened at the weighing houses of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals

and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the BUDOS Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week

with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.