Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Purple

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why purple 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

Purple. Known for being a color. Famous for being a purple-ish color. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why purple 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! Me! What is your relationship to or opinion of purple? Purple? I love it. It would be more accurate to say I like certain variants of purple. I like sort of a lavender is sort of my favorite. It's pretty good. When I think of purple, I think of like grape purple. Well, not even real grape, but like fake grape, like nerds grape purple. Me too. Also the purple parrots on that show, Legend of the Hidden Temple.

Yes. When I think of purple, like that sort of purple shirt. I'm like exact same boat. I think of purple snacks and treats and candies. And I think of, I wasn't thinking of the purple parrots, but I was thinking of the Minnesota Vikings and the Los Angeles Lakers. They're essentially the same. It tends to be a sports color for just one team in the entire league that wears all out

purple all the time. Yeah. I guess you'd call it like royal purple would be that color, right? It is the most purpley purple that there is. Jolly Rancher is purple. This leads so well into our first number of the show. So let's get into our set of fascinating numbers and statistics, which this week is in a segment called... Hey, Mr. Statsman, give me the reams of all the numbers that I've never seen. That's beautiful. Yeah.

It's from Malakarath on the Discord. I'm trying to remember who it was on Twitter, but there was someone who made this joke who was like, you know, did the lyrics of Mr. Sandman where it was like, oh, Mr. Sandman, give me some sand. But yes, we're talking about the Purple Man here, which I think is so this has missed me by a few generations, I guess. I don't know, like the Five Nights at Freddy's cinematic universe. Yeah, I skipped it. But there's like a purple man and that's a whole thing. So there's another use of the color purple. I feel like we're on Sesame Street.

What else is purple? It is a lot of villains are purple too. I feel like they give primary colors to heroes and then the purple guy in Jessica Jones or half of Magneto's outfit in X-Men. A lot of villains end up purple. Maybe. My theory about that is because, and we'll probably talk about this a little bit, but because of its affiliation with royalty, I think that sort of the minds of peons where we're like, hey, if you wear purple, you're too rich. Yeah. Now I want to lead a peasant revolt against Magneto. That sounds great. Exactly. Exactly.

My wooden bench fork. He can't do anything about that. Doesn't Ozymandias have like a purple costume or something or am I- Yes, he does. Yeah. Thinking wrong about that. Yeah. Yeah. He's very LA Lakers. I have a lot of positive affiliations with purple, though. I guess I don't so much think that it's King George oppressing the America color. There's so many cultural ways this ends up going.

And the first number is about snacks that we were talking about. Ooh, I like snacks. The first number is the decade of the 1910s. Oh, that is further back than I thought that we would go. Because I associate purple snacks with like the 90s. Yeah, this changed the 90s and the world. The 1910s is the decade when the United States started banning the farming of black currants. What? It's a berry called a black currant. Yeah. And aren't they used in like confections and it's like in soda bread. What's wrong with black currants?

Yeah. And they're back now. It's fine. But according to the Library of Congress, in the early 1900s, there was a plant disease called white pine blister rust. That sounds actually kind of cool. White pine blister rust. Yeah, it sounds like a Neil Young album or something. It's good. It does. It does. It sounds like a groovy kind of cover. I like it. This was a fungal disease attacking pine trees. And it's also a weird fungus. It can't just go from pine tree to pine tree. It needs a secondary host plant. from pine tree to pine tree. It needs a secondary host plant. Oh, man. Parasites are so cool. They sometimes just use other species as taxis.

Yeah. And they don't, it's like there's this, I don't want to get too far on this tangent, but one of my favorite parasites, Leucocloridium, is a parasite that like, it wants to be inside a bird, but then it tortures and mutilates a snail to get into the bird by like infesting its eye stocks. So, you know, parasites, you got to hand it to them. Creative. Yeah. Or tentacle it to them or whatever they're more comfortable with. Yeah.

You know, yeah. Phalange it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah. Phalanget. Yeah. And so they need a secondary host plant and their perfect secondary host is the European blackcurrant bush.

Ooh, I see. Which was the main crop blackcurrant that we were growing in the U.S. Ah. And basically the government said, let's save the timber industry that cuts down pine trees all the time by banning black currants at the federal level. I see. No more. We'll just cut the parasite chain there. And the thing is, they happened to do this right when the United States started developing candy culture. So there was a more than 50-year federal ban on black

currants. It then became state by state, and they have gradually relaxed it in many states. And there's nothing wrong with black currants if you're having them now. Yeah. But people in the U.S. are used to purple snacks being grape and are pretty unfamiliar with black currants as a fruit, even though apparently in many other countries, blackcurrants are huge. They're a big flavor. Yeah, I can't say that I've had it other than like in some kind of horrible fruitcake. You know, I think I have had blackcurrant in some kind of like baked confection situation, but I did not necessarily enjoy it.

Yeah, apparently it's particularly big in the UK and in British Commonwealth countries, except in the US. So yeah, Italy, you might not see it so much, but in countries like the UK and Australia, there's so many blackcurrant candies and snacks and stuff that when you buy Skittles, the purple Skittle is blackcurrant flavored. It's not grape flavored.

Ah, okay. Interesting. And blackcurrants have four times the vitamin C of oranges, more potassium than bananas, twice the antioxidants of blueberries. Apparently the flavor is sort of like a cross between a blueberry and a cranberry. Drinks like Ribena are a big deal. This is a very popular fruit, This is a very popular fruit, except in the U.S. So we have like a grape candies and treats culture that is basically anti-blackcurrant. We basically don't know what those are.

And is it because of that blackcurrant ban that happened to save the pine trees from chronic pine rust blight? Yeah, we started the ban in the 1910s. It wasn't relaxed until the late 1960s. Whoa, that's a long time. By that point, we'd really kind of just implemented if it's colored purple as a treat and it's sugary, it's grape stuff. It's not blackcurrant. Right. Interesting. So blackcurrants are purple in the wild or in its raw form, I should say.

Yeah, the berry, I think the berry is pretty accurately named. It's toward the black end of colors, but it's a little bit purplish. It's like a dark, very dark purple. Very dark purple. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So then, so like in the UK, if you want like purple candy, it might be black currant flavored. Yeah. Like whatever they eat over there, like the jelly babies, which I've had solidly mid. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, the UK. The jelly babies are mid. The manager of a Tesco is furious right now. What? Babies are mid. Oh, the manager of a Tesco is furious right now. The manager of a Sainsbury's is like, did you hear what they said?

And the Tesco manager is like, I did. I did. Yeah. And then the waitress manager walks in. Anyway, I know some grocery store names. You do know. You know some British grocery store names. Yeah.

And there's also kind of a range of either very purple or not purple other produce in the world. On the past stuff about carrots, we talked about the very first domesticated carrots being purple ones in Turkey, where they're still most commonly purple, not orange. That's because of high quantities of anthocyanins, a compound called anthocyanins. Sounds healthy. In general, yeah. Yeah, it's good for you. Yeah. And the other big produce with this is eggplants.

Oh, yeah. AKA aubergines, if you're in the UK or elsewhere. If you're used to the emoji version, or a lot of American ones, it's purple. And that's because of a lot of anthocyanins. But there are also a lot of eggplant varieties that are smaller and rounder and a white color, which is where the eggplant name came from. Because like when you see the purple ones, you're like, why is it called an eggplant?

Does it taste like egg? What's going on? When you see the white versions, you're like, this is that makes it all makes sense. It looks like an egg. That is a plant. It's one of the most accurate produce names. When you see that. Yeah. You're like, this is an egg on a plant. It's one of the most accurate produce names when you see that. Yeah. You're like, this is an egg on a stalk. Yeah. When you're like carrot, I don't, you know, don't know where

that one came from. The next purple number is the 1980s, but not a snack number. The 1980s is when native artists created a purple flag for the Haudenosaunee people. And the Haudenosaunee are also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. They're a group of six Native peoples in the northeast of North America. Yeah, man, that is a nice flag color. I feel like a lot of flags kind of like go with the same sort of color schemes. There's so many. I do not dislike the Italian flag, but it feels like

every other flag is some variation of red, white, blue, or green. I'm looking at this and it's pretty solidly purple and then it has a design in white. That is a nice flag look. I like this. And that is a nice flag look. I like this. It's great. And it's partly purple because it's a modern flag. According to the Buffalo News, Buffalo, New York, the spark for the flag was sports. The Haudenosaunee fielded a national men's lacrosse team in the 1980s. And the organizers of an Australian event asked if the Haudenosaunee had a flag because the other countries had flags. And so they made one.

It was a Tuscarora artist named Rick Hill, Mohawk shop owner Tim Johnson, his son Harold Johnson, and then an Onondaga faith keeper named Oren Lyons. They all collaborated on a flag. That white design especially is based on the design of a traditional wampum belt. It's often called the Hiawatha belt. The thing with the wampum belts is they're made of beads and the beads are made of clam shells from the northern quahog species of clam, which is mostly black or white colored, but it can be tinged with purplish or violet parts on the inside. Yeah. No, I think I've seen those. You open up a clam and it's white on the outside, and then it's got this cool purpley color on the inside. Yeah. A natural source of a purple bead once you turn it into beads. And so traditionally,

they were usually black and white or purplish and white. And when they made the flag, they leaned into the purple because we have strong purple dyes. And so it's the only national flag that's mainly purple. That's awesome. I do not understand why we don't branch out more with flag colors. I feel like there are so many colors that are just underutilized in national flag formations. Yeah. And this next number and takeaway coming is pretty much the main reason purple has been underused for flags because the next number is 250,000 mollusks. Wow.

Quarter million mollusks. That sounds like a party. Now you've got yourself a party, a mollusk party.. Quarter million mollusks. That sounds like a party. Now you've got yourself a party, a mollusk party. Mucosal in here. That horn sound was somebody blowing a big shell. Yeah. It's like, wait a minute, that's Liddy's shell. What'd you do to Liddy? Now we're down to 249,999 mollusks. It's tragic. But a quarter million mollusks, that's how many it took an ancient Mediterranean dye maker to generate just one ounce of purple dye. Yes. You needed a quarter million tiny mollusks of two different species to make one ounce of purple dye back in the day.

to make one ounce of purple dye back in the day. Yeah, this is, it's so interesting to me because, and that's the reason we associate purple with royalty, right? Is it was so incredibly difficult and expensive and you'd basically have to wipe out an entire ecosystem to create like a purple robe. And that revelation leads us into takeaway number one. For thousands of years, people made purple dye by harvesting vast quantities of mollusks or lichens to combine with human urine. Pee, pee, pee, pee. Yeah. Until the 1850s, everything changes and then purple dye is easy and common.

Before then, this was one of the most expensive luxury goods in the world. And the process was a very smelly mix of biology and chemistry. So there's pee that comes from other animals. And for me, for some reason, the idea of wearing a coat made out of human pee pee versus like, this is the urine of a white stag. I guess like, somehow it feels more dignified to wear like animal urine than to wear like urine that just some guy like zip down his pants is like, well, it's time to make some dye. just some guy like zip down his pants is like, well, it's time to make some dye. Yeah, the time to make the donuts baker guy, but waking up to do his morning pee and save that.

Yeah, pretty much. Saving his pee-pees. We've been innovating with our pee for a while. Apparently the ammonia and the urea is the key part of the human urine. But the hard part to get was for most dye makers, mollusks, and then in a separate but similar process, a kind of lichens. Until the 1850s, that was how we made not just purple dye, but an incredibly strong and vibrant purple dye. This was just one of the best textile colors in the world. Key sources here are a wonderful book that's been part of most SIF episodes about colors. It's called The Secret Lives of Color. It's by cultural historian and design journalist, Cassia St. Clair, also using digital resources from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and New York Times reporting by journalist Franz Litz. Because the most famous

way to make purple dye in history happened in the Mediterranean. Nearly 4,000 years ago, people on the island of Crete began harvesting two different species of small shellfish. The generic name is Murex shellfish. The scientific names are Murex brandaris and Thais haemostoma. But they're both spiky carnivorous mollusks, and you can get an organic liquid from their bodies that you can then turn into a purple dye. I assume these mollusks do not survive the procedure, or do they just like tickle them and they sneeze out purple? Apparently they usually die sooner or later, because what you do is the first step is cracking their shell open. Ouch. Mollusks don't love that. So maybe they live through it, but

it's, you know, it's hard to like continue to be a mollusk at that point. So, yeah. And then after you crack it open, you find a long pale organ called the hypobranchial gland. Ah, yeah, that one. You know, we all check on that with our doctor. And then you squeeze one drop of clear, slimy liquid out of that gland, just one droplet per mollusk. And you taste it, and you're like, that's good hyposomething gland juice, hypobranchial gland juice. Hypobranchial gland juice. That one drop, if you tasted it, it would be like eating your cocaine or something.

It would be such a waste of valuable, expensive stuff. And we're not supposed to do that. I see. And yeah, and then you let sunlight turn that liquid a series of colors. And the last and best color is a dark reddish purple. A pretty reddish purple, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder said the ideal shade is the color of clotted blood. Like that reddish of a purple. Man, that sounds great. I would love to wear that. Hey, get out of the studio, Roman emperor. We're trying to tape a podcast,

me and Katie. Is he gone? Good. Okay. Yeah, then you gather a bunch of that liquid, put it in a vat of stale urine for at least 10 days. And after that very smelly, laborious process, you have purple dye. Smells divine. Apparently, quote, archaeologists have tended to find ancient dye works relegated to the outskirts of towns and cities. End quote from Cassius St. Clair. Due to the huge

urine smell. And this was horrible work to have to do. But it's so interesting because you go from this disgusting smelly labor of like digging around in snails, right? And these mollusks pulling out their hyperbrachial goo gland and squeezing it, letting it just fester in the sun in a bucket of old urine. fester in the sun in a bucket of old urine that juxtaposition of like it's pee pee smelling stuff and like really rich people wearing it kind of like you know how we just had the met gala and i think one of them had like a block of ice that was like a purse and had like a rose in the

middle of it and someone else had like a $2,000 bag that like was meant to look like a chips bag. Fashion is weird. Yeah. If this was a comedy video, I would be like, I think we have footage of that and just roll the Hunger Games capital people. Yeah. And yet when I pee my pants, people don't recognize it as fashion. Yeah. And I'm covered in snails. Everyone's like, are you OK? And I'm like, of course I'm OK. I'm the most stylish person here. It's fashion, sweetie. Look it up.

I want the devil wears Prada Miranda like, you know, how she has that whole speech about cobalt, but the speech about like purple and like, you know, and you think you're above it, but everyone pisses. And as we're pissing, we're pissing away the color purple. Anne Hathaway, not drenched in pee, slulks out of the room like, oh, I'm not cool. You know how many snails had to die for your frumpy little cardigan? And yeah, that was pretty much the Mediterranean for for like 4 000 years was people saying this is the greatest this started on crete in what we call the minoan civilization around 1900 bc and then

became popular and improved in cities of the phoenician culture especially a city called tyre and the ancient romans named this Tyrian purple because of places like that being famous for it. It was so popular in Rome, they made laws about who could wear it. Senators and consuls in an office called praetors had a specific wide band of purple on their toga. There was a narrower band for the lower noble class. Later on, only the emperor could wear it. Then they started doing a policy where anybody could wear it if you paid a huge tax. And in many societies, just the economics of this color limited it to the rich. And then a few like the Romans made laws on top of that.

So what did the California raisins do? Like were they permitted? Well, these guys are cool. They have a saxophone and they're dancing raisins. I suppose we can make an exception. Now I'm imagining a European dry to black currents band that was their version. Like shriveled black currents playing music. They have like an accordion and a recorder. Yeah.

Yeah. Oompa Toompa and stuff. Yeah. Oompa Toompa. Yeah, oompa-toompa and stuff, yeah. Oompa-toompa, yeah. Lederhosen. Yeah, and as much as Romans loved this stuff, the Phoenicians might have been even more into it culturally and in their reputation. I want to just clarify, you are saying Phoenicians, not Venetians.

Yes, yeah, Phoenicians. Sort of like a phoenix bird, yeah. Right, Phoenicians, not Venetians. Yes. Yeah. Phoenicians. Sort of like a phoenix bird. Right. Phoenicians. Yeah. Although Venice had a lot of purple going on, but that's just because they were rich. Yeah. They were rich as heck because they had all that water.

And if you were a port city, literally, right? Like you had all the, you had that access, that bay that you had, it was a major trading route. The canals just facilitated that within the city. But yeah, it was run in Italy used to be a bunch of different countries. And Venice was an incredibly powerful, wealthy one. And now it's sinking. Yeah.

It's sinking. Yeah, and I was just thinking of the Phoenicians were also, it was a series of coastal trading cities. They were sort of like Venice and the wealth from water. And purple was so important to their culture. They had a major myth about the invention of purple dye. It turns out the city of Tyre worshipped a patron demigod named Melquart. Melquart? M-E-L-Q-A-R-T.

Melquart. Like, not milkwort, like, but Melquart? Melquart, yeah. Melquart was a big muscular guy wearing a loincloth and a lion skin. Hell yeah. And we think the Greeks might have kind of stolen him to make Hercules. Yeah, they did a lot of like, we're going to like take some of these, the pagan holidays and rebrand it as Christian holidays. There's a lot of rebranding going on as there were paradigm shifts.

Yes. And yeah, we tend to think of the Greeks as being a starting point, but they were stealing stuff from before. And so Melquart, which I had never heard of, but is a root of a bunch of- The thing is that does not sound like a tough guy, like buff jock God. It sounds like a little purple dude who's like an alien and all he can say is Melkwart, Melkwart. Right, like the great gazoo from, I think, the Flintstones. It is great gazoo coded, but apparently, you know, Herculean actually. All right. So we've got Melkwart, who is like a very buff Pokemon. Oh, sort of a Machomp figure.

Yeah, he's like a Machomp. Okay, Mackwort. How does he make purple? So he was so cool, he had a sea nymph girlfriend. Sweet. Right? Awesome. Everyone wants one of those. And her name is Tyrus, and she had a pet dog.

That's hard to do as a sea nymph, I would imagine. Yeah, the story is she was walking her dog on the beach, which is, I guess, where you have to. I guess so, yeah. Yeah, unless it's a scuba dog. And so she's walking her dog on the beach. The dog bites one of these mollusks, one of these murax shellfish. And then that stains the dog's mouth purple, which is not really how it works in life, but that's the myth, you know? And then Tyrus says, I love the stain in my dog's mouth as a color.

It's a great fashion color, probably. Can my boyfriend Melquart make me a robe in this wonderful purple color? And then he does a Labor of Hercules type story inventing purple dye. The Phoenicians were sort of described as the inventors of purple to the point that that's where their name's from, or at least what we call them in English. It might be an acronym, a name from outside. The Greeks called the Phoenician region and place Phoenike, which is a word related to the Greek word phoenix, which means just the color reddish purple. So, you know, like this Greek name, it might just mean the land of reddish purple. It sounds like that does sound sort of like a New Yorker trying to pronounce Phoenix, Arizona. Or maybe more accurate, maybe like more like an Australian, an Australian pronouncing Phoenix, Arizona.

Yeah. A fan of the Phoenix Suns. They wear purple, right? The NBA team. Right. It's all coming together. It is. It's all connected.

Yeah. And when we use the English version of the Greek name, we're pretty much calling them Purple Land or Purple People. This was truly their deal. The Purple People? Yeah. And from the 1800s BC all the way to the mid-1800s AD, this was the main way to get purple dye and good dye. It was one of the best dyes in the world. And so kings, top religious clergy, just due to the price of it, they tended to be the ones having it. We also find archaeological sites of vast piles of discarded shells all over this part of the Mediterranean because people have just been making this dye there for thousands of years. What happened to the species? Because often when you have a species that is exploited in this way, it's not necessarily great for their population.

Yeah. A couple of different sources I read expressed astonishment that these shellfish are not extinct and are fine. Yeah. Because you would think, yeah. But they just killed a bunch of them and they reproduced enough for it to be okay. Yeah, and this story, lichens also survive in a very surprising way because lichens would be easy to wipe out. The one other purplish dye was almost harder to make. It's a dye called orchil, O-R-C-H-I-L, sometimes spelled archil. But it was made from a species of lichens. The main one is scientific name Rosella tinctoria. And there's patches of it all over the Atlantic world. It's in Scotland. It's in the Canary Islands. It's on the coast of West Africa. If you harvest that by

hand during a few months of the year and then soak that in a bunch of human urine. It's always got to be urine, though. That's the common thing. And that's part of why this didn't replace Tyrion die. Right. You also need to find a bunch of grubby little creatures on a coast and soak them in human urine. So people weren't like, this is better. But you get almost more of a pale red color than a purple. But some people paid huge

prices for that because sort of like Tyrian purple, it's one of the only great dyes for many thousands of years. Right. Yeah. Because otherwise, if you use just mashed up berries to dye something, it might be nice for a little while, but it's probably going to wear off and it's also going to be very muted. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. People could also have purple flowers in their lives, but that has the lifespan of a flower. This was a truly unique and beloved luxury good. And that changes in 1856 with a scientific discovery. Until then, it was only for kings. And then suddenly it was for everybody. We've found a way to make purple dye without the urine. And everyone's like, aw, but we like the urine.

Yeah, tell that one weird guy to cut it out, was what the king said, I guess. We have done numbers and this huge takeaway. We've got more takeaways and numbers to come after a quick break. bonus show every week, and I want to round a few of them up for you. These past few weeks, we've explored astounding public middle fingers in Italy, the bamboo tokens that save the economy of China, the IOUs that save the economy of Ireland, the secret musical phenomenon of cursive singing, the ham crimes of Richard Nixon. Those are special stories for the members who support this show. If you visit MaximumFun.org slash join, you can join the bonus party.

Every week you get that extra treat in your feed. Most of all, you get the satisfaction of making this whole podcast possible. Again, that's MaximumFun.org slash join, and I'll see you at this week's bonus party. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back with the discovery that made all of the purple clothes you have happen,

or purple whatever. We have a purple couch at my home. It's great. Oh, wow. That's cool. It's been fun. We thought it was risky risky and then it's just been wonderful. Yeah. I love purple. I'm actually, I have a chair that my grandparents bought in the 70s or 80s and it's in rough shape. So I'm trying to kind of like refurbish it. And so I'm using like visible darning where I'm using yarn to kind of like patch over the rough spots. And I am using some purple, purple yarn. Not, not like it's not all purple,

but there's just like a few strands of purple in there to kind of like give it a little more, a little more pop there. So. It's probably from after 1856. I think this was made with pee-pee and rare mollusks slash lichen. Because yeah, the next number is 1856. That's when British chemist William Henry Perkin created a synthetic purple dye and changed basically all colors and dyes for everybody. Oh, is this the guy that accidentally made purple?

Yeah, and it gets its own mini takeaway number two. One teenager democratized purple and all dye colors by messing up medical research. Yes. Okay. So I actually, the reason I'm familiar with this is I had a picture book as a kid that was like about weird, gross and accidental science. And this was in there. It was a life-changing book.

Yeah. This explains some things. I'm sure your temperament fits it where you went anyway. But yeah, this helped. Yeah, this explains some things. I'm sure your temperament fits it where you want anyway, but yeah, this helped. Yeah, but it helped. It definitely helped. Yeah. Yeah, this is a mistake in an attempt to fight malaria. And this came up briefly on the past SIF episode about magenta. The mosquitoes will be afraid of the purple. They'll be like, ah, it's too bold of a fashion choice. Yeah, if you put a McDonald's's grimace outside your house, no mosquitoes this summer, baby, you're all set. You know, there's a certain truth to that because there's an idea that disruptive coloration might confuse mosquitoes, like zebra print might confuse mosquitoes into not like landing and biting a

zebra. So if you wear a zebra print, maybe less mosquitoes. I don't know if that's actually true, but you know, you could give it a shot. The zebra from Fruit Stripe brand gum, not grimace. Here we go. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Man, that gum, you do like two chews and it's the best thing ever. But after that third chew, it tastes like nothingness. Anyways, we've got a kid, a teenager being like, I'm going to fix malaria, dude. Wait, where is he from? Britain. I'm going to fix malaria, right? And then he causes an explosion and it's all purple. Yeah. And the key sources are digital resources from the Royal Society, curated by Catherine Marshall,

and also science writing for The Guardian by Annalisa Barbieri. Because in 1856, William Henry Perkin is 18 years old. He is a high school senior in my head, but just 18 and doing science. But back in the day, 18 was like 40. Exactly. You were supposed to have had three children and fought a war and then retire pretty soon. Not actually true. They still saw that as young.

But it's a funny concept. Not actually true. They still saw that as young, but it's a funny concept. People in countries like Britain are trying to create more quinine. Quinine is a medication to treat the tropical disease malaria. You could get quinine already, but you had to harvest it from the bark of the cinchona tree in South America. Right. And so people in Britain said, we are trying to colonize tropical places. How can we do this if the only quinine is from a South American tree? Let's get other quinine. Let's do it. It's like, well, why don't we colonize South America? That was absolutely one of their ideas. But beyond creating British Kiana and so on,

they also said, hey, let's do medical research. And so Perkin is just experimenting on a series of substances. And one of them is coal tar. Coal tar is a toxic waste product of gaslighting systems. So it's basically free. And he's trying to solve two problems. Like, let's use up this waste and make quinine. That would be cool.

I like the idea of like, well, here's this useless junk. Can it be turned into less useless junk? Yeah, it's kind of what Tyrians did with urine. Yeah. They were like, oh, we can make a luxury good that's beautiful. Wow. Out of the pee-pee. And Perkin fails to generate quinine.

As he fails, he ends up with a black sooty byproduct all over his equipment. The pee-pee. And Perkin fails to generate quinine. As he fails, he ends up with a black sooty byproduct all over his equipment. And then he discovers that byproduct contains a purple substance that can be used as a dye. And it's not just a purple dye. It's better than all other existing dyes. It's the first dye that we would call colorfast. It's bright. You can wash something something many many times before it fades it's slow to fade in sunlight and best of all it's cheap and so the first dye from this is purple the next dye people make is the color magenta after that they

make color fast dyes of pretty much every color from this aniline process, it's called. And so this British teenager in 1850 was like, and now I must create a commercial-friendly character that is this color, that can promote this color, that has something of a smile, but it's a bit of a tense smile, so I shall call him Rictus. Steampunk Grimace is really fun. That's really good. But yeah, and it's a total change for all dyes and all colors. It's why anybody below king level had any wonderful bright clothing that was easy and cheap. And stuff like fast fashion is a problem. But this was a real democratization of all color for everybody.

And it's kind of amazing that the first color it democratized is purple, the king color. Yeah. You know? It does feel sort of like poetic justice to accidentally create purple for the people, not out of pee-pee. Yeah. A people purple made without pee-pee. Yeah. And so that's amazing and really cool. And we'll talk in the bonus show this week about one secret, even more luxurious purple.

But in general, purple was now for everybody suddenly. There's a pre and post luxury purple date of 1856. Man, that's awesome. We still have purple numbers to go. The next one is three. And this episode comes out on U.S. Memorial Day. So this is just appropriate to go. The next one is three. And this episode comes out on US Memorial Day. So this is just appropriate to it. But three is the number of soldiers awarded a heart-shaped piece of purple cloth by George Washington personally. Whoa. I didn't realize it went all the way back to

old Mr. Woodenteeth times. And it doesn't, it doesn't. This was very surprising. It turns out George Washington personally invented the Purple Heart Award of the U.S. military, but it also disappeared for more than 100 years as an award. Oh. According to the U.S. National World War II Museum in New Orleans, George Washington created an award called the Badge of Military Merit. In 1782, he gave cloth Purple Hearts to three of his sergeants to be worn on their chests. And that's before 1856. That's a pretty luxurious, amazing award. It's like giving someone a gold medal, kind of, because was like a luxury fabric i see yeah apparently

in roman times around the 300s purple dye was worth three times its weight in gold like the liquid purple dye i mean it's like better than a gold medal with gold you just dig it out of the ground you don't have to like scrape it out of a snail and then pee on it. Yeah, those dirty old gold prospectors are much less dirty than purple shellfish guys. It's close, but I'd probably rather sniff a gold prospector than a purple dye creator in the before times. This episode is such a win for gold prospectors. Hello, gold prospectors. It's for you.

Yeah. Do your little weird shimmy dance on a hillside in celebration. There's gold in them snails. And so Washington does this, and then quoting the museum here, Despite this great start, the badge of military merit was soon forgotten for 150 years. In all that time, only the original three were known to have been issued, end quote. They just kind of forgot about the Purple Hearts. And then I sort of assumed this was either only modern or had always been an award, but George Washington personally did three Clothwins and then jumped to 1932, which was 200 years after Washington's birth and found out about that story. So he created a modern military medal called the Purple Heart based on that Washington story.

And to this day, it has Washington's picture on it. Oh, really? I thought it was just like a little purple heart. It is. And then there's like a yellow image of Washington. I see. Okay. And MacArthur's version was just a medal for meritorious service. It wasn't until World War II that we turned it into an award honoring injuries and deaths and wounds in the line of battle.

Right. Yeah. Interesting. So it went from just like, good job to something a little more, you know, tragic. tragic. Yeah. And also interesting as a medal because apparently it's awarded for basic criteria. You don't need your commanding officer to decide you deserve it. It's just if a service person is wounded during battle and requires treatment that was documented by a medical officer, they get a Purple Heart. So it's very democratic. It's an amazing medal to earn. And also the Pentagon says approximately 1.7 million have been awarded all time. You just get it. You don't have to have some officer say you deserve it. Right. I mean, that seems fair, right?

Like if two people get an injury and the officer is like, well, yeah, but I think Jimmy's injury is cooler. That's not nice. Yeah, that wouldn't be good. It's also like good. It takes it off commander's plates. Like just this is one of the I have an even bigger appreciation of it now. It's a very good award. Yeah.

Thank you, everyone who has one. And the next number here about Purple is 2023. everyone who has one. And the next number here about purple is 2023. The year 2023 is when a Pennsylvania school district attempted to ban Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple. What? 2023. Like now, you know? Weird. That's a pretty important book. It is, and it's one of the most challenged across all of its publication history. Really? I mean, I know it has some pretty mature themes in it, but as long as it's,

you know, I mean, sure, like you may not want to read that to kindergartners, but once you have older students, that seems like an appropriate book to learn. Yeah, it's pretty much just been challenged by various districts for the mature themes and maybe in a unspoken way because it discusses and addresses racism. Oh, okay. There's a lot of sexual violence in it. And so that's, you know, hard, but also it's written by Alice Walker from her experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South. And it's tough that people think that's not OK to talk about. We have a book called Lord of the Flies.

It's about little boys killing each other. I feel like there's a lot of this thing of like, ah, students aren't tough enough and we're coddling them and giving them participation trophies. But then it's like, oh, here's a book that has some mature themes. And it's like, oh, we mustn't teach them that. Right. And we can only tell them specific things about George Washington. That's it. Yeah. Right. He was just kind of a fun guy with wooden teeth and nothing else. Yeah. And yeah. And this book, it's been a massive bestseller since publication in 1982. Schools in California started to try to ban it in 1984. And it's always been a popular book and also challenged for some of the relatively difficult topics in it. The Color Purple is

maybe a leading example of a book that is partly getting banned because it's so popular. It was also adapted into a commercially and critically successful Steven Spielberg movie in the 80s that got 11 Oscar nominations. It's also been a recent movie. There's a hit Broadway musical. The American Library Association says sometimes books get more bans because they're so prominent. A lot of these book banning people have only heard of movies and not read very many books. I'm sorry, but that tracks. Yeah.

And so there's sort of a good sign and that people are trying to ban it because it's so popular and impactful and well known. and impactful and well-known. Yeah, this is one of the most important cultural uses of the color purple on top of all its other big themes. In the book, it gets used really two ways. There's a character, Seelie, who wants a purple dress because the purple makes her feel like royalty. And then toward the end of the book, the character Shug tells Seelie, quote, it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it, end quote. And Walker in a 2016 interview said, quote, it actually could be any color you don't notice. It speaks to our blindness about the wonder of this place, this earth we live in. That's beautiful.

So, yeah, it's one of the most amazing artistic statements about just the topic today, the color. Yeah. I mean, I do think that is very poetic, especially when it's like you take something like, man, it's just a color, right? There's a ton of colors. What's so special about a color? And there's so much history and, you know, sociopolitical background behind it, biology, so many things. It's just, it is like when you just kind of stop for a minute and take in the complexity of just one tiny facet of the world, it is overwhelming. And then you realize, oh my God, there's like trillions of other things as well. Exactly. Really feel that way. And a whole nother artistic statement about this color, the number is August, 2017. August, 2017. That is the month when two of Prince's sisters

gave conflicting statements about Prince's favorite color. Whoa. Right. Because if people know Prince, he's very purple. He's very purple. Whole deal. Or was. And highly fashionable.

He has sort of a Rococo style. Right. Also, like, thinks a lot about his presentation and made it all purple. Like, it was a definite choice. It's very cool. But he passed away in 2016. And then in August 2017, he has many siblings, but his sister, Taika Nelson, told an interviewer, and I'm sure she was just treating it as an interesting tidbit. She said that even though Prince was famed for purple clothes and iconography,

his personal favorite color was orange. Huh. However, within days, the press basically asked the rest of his siblings if this is true. And his eldest sibling, Sharon Nelson, said, quote, Contrary to what has been said, purple was and is Prince's color. Wow. Family drama, huh? There was a color argument among his siblings.

I get that, though. Like, sometimes my family members are like, I thought you loved Go-Gurt. And I'm like, no. And they're like, no, I'm pretty sure you did. And it's this, I can never convince them that, in fact, I have never loved Go-Gurt even once. Anyways, sis. And you try to get away from Go-Gurt, but it's so portable. It is so portable, but I don't like yogurt. So why would I like yogurt on the go has been my argument. Yeah. And Prince's sibling who said he loved purple also said Prince was, quote, fond of many colors in the rainbow, but he especially loved the color purple because it represented royalty. The color purple always made him feel princely, end quote. That makes sense. And he used to be named Prince before he became the artist formerly known as Prince.

is formerly known as Prince. Right. Like he was so fundamentally purple, he changed his name to a symbol, but the symbol was still purple and his stuff was still purple. Like it's almost more his name than his name. It's the color purple. Yeah.

It's great. I love that creativity. I don't know if it's perfect sourcing, but there's a lot of claims online also explaining what Purple Rain is, because that was a huge album and a song from it, a follow-up movie. It's sort of the most distinctive artistic statement from Prince. And there's a quote, the music magazine NME, they say that Prince once said, quote, there's blood in the sky, red, and blue equals purple. Purple rain

pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith slash God guide you through the purple rain, end quote. So it's like blood is red, water is blue, red plus blue is purple. So purple rain means like an apocalyptic rain. Red plus blue is purple. So purple rain means like an apocalyptic rain. Interesting. It's great artistically in terms of what would actually happen if you mix water and blood. Because water is, in fact, not blue.

You know. The chemistry doesn't really check out. However, it's art. It's art. It would probably just be red rain, but I'm not going to bother you about it. It depends, too, right? Because it'd probably be a pale red rain, like if it's mixed with water, sort of washed out like pink or something. And then it'd turn brown as it oxidizes. And then you mix in Vulcan blue blood from Star Trek.

Now we have purple rain. It's human and Vulcan blood. You nerd. Thank you for being open about not being on board. That was great. I like Star Trek. And how many stars they trek over. It kind of takes us in a physics and space direction. The last number is about 300 nanometers. Wow. I know. Probably not that much.

It's very tiny amount, 300 nanometers. That's the wavelength size of ultraviolet light. nanometers. That's the wavelength size of ultraviolet light. Ooh, yes. Oh, yeah, that's cool. And it's our very last takeaway here, which is takeaway number three. Most people can see purple, and a few specific people can see ultraviolet. Ooh, I actually know this one, Alex. Oh, cool. People who have had eye surgery, typically like cataract surgery, where their lens has been replaced with an artificial lens because that

part of the eye protects the retina from ultraviolet light. It blocks it out and so we can't see it. But people who have like an artificial eye surgery, it actually doesn't block that wavelength. And so some people who have that surgery report seeing ultraviolet light. Exactly. And yeah, apparently it's also happened with people who had their lens removed and nothing put in. Right. Yes. Yeah. Like either you have something replace it that lets it in or just you're just like kind of free lensing it, I guess you'd call it. You just got nothing. Free lensing it.

Well, there was a theory about, I think, Monet that he had cataracts as he got older. And so he had a sort of cataract surgery where it made things kind of more blurry, but also he could see things, but he may have actually been able to see ultraviolet light, which is why the speculation is that his paintings became more purpley as he got older because of the ultraviolet. I don't know that that has ever really been confirmed by historians, right? This could be apocryphal, but it's an interesting idea. This could be apocryphal, but it's an interesting idea. Exactly. And it was kind of a theory about the whole Impressionist movement in its time, was that they all were either obsessed with violet or fully seeing ultraviolet light that the rest of us were not. And that explained their paintings and their style.

I just visited Giverny recently. That's why I'm like all hyped up on my Monet facts. Oh, totally. How was it? It was cool. It was nice. Yeah. Monet had a great garden. That's good. Yeah. It seems amazing. Dude could garden. He probably had other people do the gardening for him, but it was a nice garden. He also just clearly loved colors because like you go in, like you're allowed to go and tour his house and he had one room that was just all yellow. It was like a dining room that was super yellow and then a kitchen that was like super, super blue. So he just clearly loved all the colors. It seems like it could be a little of both in terms of was his art driven by ultraviolet light or not, because he worked in all sorts of colors. His first Impressionist paintings were not specifically violet or purple. And then at the same time, opponents of the Impressionist movement accused them of violetomania. Some movement members claimed all shadows are violet and not a gray or black or whatever. The similar name artist, Edouard Manet to tell, but that might have opened his eyes up to ultraviolet light because they wouldn't have put something artificial in.

They would have just left his eye open. Yes. Well, even with artificial lenses, a lot of them still allow the ultraviolet light to come in. to come in. The way I've heard it described, like what the experience is of seeing ultraviolet light is it is like a glowing bluey purple. And if any of you guys have migraines out there, it almost sounds like a migraine halo, but just not unpleasant. Like when you get the migraine halo, you're like, uh-oh, it's not good because you're like, ooh, pretty colors. You're just like, well, I should take a Tylenol and lie down. But I think that if you see that kind of glowy, I don't know, they just say it's almost like a halo of this very glowy kind of color.

And there are animals that can see it, like birds. A lot of insect species can see it because it helps guide them towards flowers. And flowers have specific ultraviolet coloration that creates sort of like landing strips for pollinators. So there's a lot of ultraviolet light out there. And the most likely reason that we cannot see it is that UV light is essentially carcinogenic over long periods of time or a lot of exposure so that like our eyes are so delicate that if we were all just seeing UV light all the time where it was reaching the back of our retina, there's a theory that it could cause more eye damage, which is important for a species like us that spends so much of our time looking at things over many, many years. Yeah, exactly. I don't think about light that much, but when it's come up on this show, in incredibly general terms, the colors we see are based on wavelength sizes of light. And our eyes are just constrained for which wavelengths they can see. The longest wavelengths are on the red end. And then there's infrared light that we

can see with devices or animals like mosquitoes and vampire bats can see. And then, like Katie said, the shortest wavelengths, those ultraviolet lights, most of us can't see them. It's down to about 300 nanometers, but some of us can, lots of animals can. And then the range most of us can see starts around 380 nanometers with violet and purple. And so because purple's on the end of the spectrum, we can see it's, I think, also an interesting color to us, but there's colors beyond it that other people and creatures are seeing too. And we have photoreceptive cells that generally capture ranges of these wavelengths. And it's not so much that we have a photoreceptor for each color, but it's an average of the activation of the different photoreceptor cells. So maybe some are more sensitive to like some lower wavelengths or middle or higher wavelengths.

And there's some crossover. But then what the brain does is it takes in that information. It takes sort of this average of the different types of receptors that have been activated. You know, some might be mid-range, some might be higher. And then it like combines those together. And then that is how we process color. And that's why we don't just see red, green, blue. We see, you know, a whole spectrum of almost limitless types of colors.

Yeah. And it's all so cool. And purple has that weird, unique role in it. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's all so cool. And purple has that weird, unique role in it. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. You know, purple is one of those colors that I can, that kind of like, I can taste it in my brain. Now I want grape things. And you in Britain can have some black currants or whatever, whatever you do. I'm not in Britain.

Oh, I mean the listener. But yeah, I know'm not in Britain. Oh, I mean the listener. But yeah, I know you're in Italy. Oh, I see. Yeah, you can have a really weird wine or something. Look, this red wine got freaky. 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. Takeaway number one, for thousands of years, people made purple dye by harvesting vast

quantities of mollusks or lichens to combine with human urine. Takeaway number two, one teenager democratized purple and all dye colors by messing up medical research. Takeaway number three, most people can see purple and a few specific people can see ultraviolet. Plus so many numbers about purple hearts, musicians, books, snacks, flags, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the Roman purple stone that was even more luxurious than purple dye. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of

more than 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's 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 the book The Secret Lives of Color by cultural historian and design journalist Kassia St. Clair. A new archaeological study of a settlement that it turns out was producing purple

in modern coastal Israel that was reported on by journalist Franz Lids for the New York Times. Also leaned on a lot of digital resources from the UK Royal Society, the US National World War II Museum, the American Library Association, and more. 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 Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also worth saying, I'm just south of traditional land of the Mohawk people and other Haudenosaunee people. Also, Katie 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 SIF 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 158. That's about the topic of CAPTCHAs, the Internet and Digital Security System CAPTCHAs. Fun Internet and Digital Security System CAPTCHAs. Fun fact there, every new CAPTCHA is an attempt to win a security arms race and generate a potential profit center.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. A lot of animals and science on this episode. She gets even more into that there. 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'm 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.