Science, Commerce, and Why Indigo is not a Color.

Please note: This includes an extremely cursory overview of Britain's involvement on the Indian subcontinent, which is well beyond the scope of this newsletter. In an attempt to add some color to the narrative, there may be some slight oversimplications and overgeneralizations in this newsletter, leading to minor historical inaccuracies which are not completely germane to the topic at hand.

• Indigo, the pigment, fell out of use in the 1880s because of scientific advances in synthetic dyes. Clothing manufacturers would rather have a cheaper, more readily available color, than an expensive import which was arguably the cause of wars and civil uprisings.
• Out of fear, the indigo industry fought against the fraudulent use of the color name, leading to synthetic dye makers branding their own colors.
• No one would use the term indigo, unless they would be using the costly blue pigment created from processing the indigofera tinctoria. When people stop using the word to describe a color, the color stops existing. Now it's just blue.
• Prior to that, indigo had primarily been imported by the British East India Company from the Indian Subcontinent, since a little before 1689.
• The main reason indigo is still part of our color vocabulary is because Sir Isaac Newton, a famous scientist, decided to include it in his spectrum of light.
• Isaac Newton, politician, became a member of Parliament after the ascendancy of William of Orange to King, which was coincidentally the other discrete color he added to the spectrum in his 1704 work.
• William of Orange, while both King of England et al, and Stadtholder of Holland et al, decided that the Dutch should get the spice routes to the East and the English would receive the textile trade, ending decades of Anglo-Dutch conflict.
• Isaac Newton, a wealthy businessman and the Master of the Mint, also happened to be on the board of the British East India company who was responsible for the import of indigo.

Newton's Rainbow

We didn't really use the word in English before Newton, and we basically stopped using the color word by the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, there were only roughly 220 years when indigo was used as a color in English, from around 1670 - 1890.

I've already written about how Newton was incorrect in choosing 7 colors for the rainbow, and I also worked to find a solution in which Newton's spectrum would work. But I also missed something which is now quite obvious in retrospect.

In the newsletter about the colors of the rainbow, I had noted that most pre-modern depictions of the rainbow were comprised of either 3 or 4 colors, and that most of the color words used were of luxury items. I was so focused on dealing with the number of colors, that I didn't consider the colors that he added.

Research Papers

In a letter dated in February 6, 1671, Isaac Newton wrote to the Royal Society, of which he would later serve as its 12th president, which was published in their "Philosphical Proceedings" , he divided the colors into two distinct categories:

There are therefore two sorts of Colours. The one original and simple, the other compounded of these. The Original or primary colours are, Red, Yellow, Green, Blew, and a Violet-purple, together with Orange, Indico, and an indefinite variety of Intermediate gradations.

It is apparent that Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet-Purple were his primary colors, and Orange and Indico (Indigo) were two examples of an infinite list of potential colors to include.

But we also see in his work that he wasn't always consistent with his color names. Violet could be violet, purple, or violet-purple. Red could also be described as scarlet.

For, a mixture of Yellow and Blew makes Green; of Red and Yellow makes Orange; of Orange and Yellowish green makes yellow. [...] But those, which are situated at too great a distance, do not so. Orange and Indico produce not the intermediate Green, nor Scarlet and Green the intermediate yellow.

By late 1672, he followed up with answers to many questions he had been posed by other members of the Royal Society. It is there that we first see him use the color word Indigo (as opposed to Indico), he clarifies that the color scarlet is a deep red, and he uses the terminology of pale [blue] and deep [blue], which he defines as Indigo.

Opticks

It would be 32 years before Newton would publish the first printing of his Opticks, which is when he switches to describing the spectrum of light as

violet, indico, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, together with all their intermediate degrees in a continual succession perpetually varying...

Again, I cannot stress enough that, according to Newton, there are infinite intermediate shades of colors in the spectrum of light. As I've written about in several earlier newsletters, he explains that he chose the number 7 because of its similarity to musical scales. And of all the infinite possibilities, he chose 2 "compounded" colors to include within his spectrum.

And those two colors happen to be relatively new, to say the least. Tawny was falling away as what we would describe as orange today, and indigo was being being grown in the American colonies, and more importantly, on the Indian subcontinent.

Newtonian Wealth

It should be mentioned somewhere that between 1672 and 1704, Newton became extremely wealthy. When William of Orange became King of England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1689, he invited Newton. Newton then became a member of Parliament that year.

William of Orange's ascendancy to English monarch also ended the Anglo-Dutch Wars, because he was simultaneously the Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic. A compromise had been reached concerning trade routes with the East, namely that the Dutch would receive the rights to the spice trade and the English would receive the textile trade.

In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton became Warden of the Mint, and then in 1699 was made Master of the Mint, a position he held until his death. Not only would he personally receive a small amount sum for each coin minted, through the East India's China trade routes, he was able to import enough gold to mint roughly the same quantity of coins that had been minted, cumulatively, in more than 350 years. He also persecuted and executed counterfeiters. Sources say that Newton was listed as a Director of the British East India company in 1720.

In a nutshell, within 50 years, the textile trade expanded. The British East India Company started by installing a puppet ruler in a single province, and proceeded to commercially colonize the Subcontinent, with the help of armed forces. By 1851, the Crown shuttered the company, and made India a full-fledged colony.

One of the lead exports from India was indigo, which made a lot of people very wealthy. It also led to wars, bloodshed, and slavery-like conditions for locals. For nearly two centuries, indigo was so valuable, because it replaced European woad as a blue dye.

As we saw in the newsletter about the Biblical Blue, the two dyes are nearly impossible to tell apart, but a single indigo plant would create a larger quantity of pigment. Also, plantations in India were able to grow much larger quanties of the plant than Europe had ever been able to grow of woad.

Two Newtonian Theories

So why did the famed scientist Isaac Newton add the colors Orange and Indigo to his spectrum of light?

Conscious Decision

It could have been either a conscious decision to honor the Crown and to celebrate his accumulation of wealth.

Remember that this includes, but is not limited to, the rainbow. Every single beam of light, in his mind, included Orange and Indigo.

That connects to earlier research that I had written about the color choices Ezekiel, Revelations, Artistotle and others made to describe the rainbow, in which the colors used to describe the rainbow were related to to valuable or precious items. It's also why Newton would sometimes slip and write Purple and Scarlet, because those were royal colors.

Subconscious Bias

It could have also been a subconscious decision, connected to a frequency or selection bias. As the words indigo and orange were so constant in his mind, when he looked at the refraction of light, he couldn't help but notice those distinct colors.

Whatever the reason, he ended up with 7 colors in the spectrum, and made the musical connection.

The Indigo Industry

Why was indigo valuable? As I wrote above, because it supplanted woad as a pigment for dyeing the color blue.

The problem is that it represented wealth generation for the growers, it wasn't a symbol of wealth to wearer. Early on, the two ideas were more intertwined, but with the creation of synthetic colors, the connection was severed. The industry was so entrenched with the status quo, it feared change, and its fear of change was the ultimate demise of the color indigo.

Fraud and Business

During much of the 1800s, the Times of London would feature new indigo sales prices, and indigo (from all the various places) was considered to be valuable. But by the 1880s, the indigo dealers were fighting a different type of battle.

No longer were they necessarily fighting for production, which had its own wars, they wanted to prevent the exclusivity of the "brand", which was already being diluted by indigo dye from different natural sources, all being grouped together to be "indigo", but also the rise of synthetic blue dyes.

Again, just like with butter and margarine, the manufacturers wanted to ensure that no one would confuse the products, so the indigo merchants went on the offensive against the synthetics and were likely one of the earliest cases of color prevention.

I would say that it worked, except that they misunderstood something critical about the market and color. We saw the shift in the 1860s, when mauve, a synthetic purple, magenta, and all the other similar synthetic aniline dyes took over the market.

We also have to remember that unlike the butter / margarine war, with the rise of the manufactured cloth and ready dyed clothing, the indigo / aniline blue war was a business to business battle, not a consumer branding debate.

Much like the fast fashion of today, people cared less about the longevity and exclusivity of the fabric, which would ultimately shifting into seasonal fads, which necessitated the ability to maintain manufacturing without fearing supply chain shortages. The supply chain itself shifted. It wasn't quite to Just In Time (JIT), but it was planned. 

Fraud and Indigo

It is somewhat ironic that the fear of fraud was what brought indigo down, as we had seen in the Jerusalem Talmud, it seems that indigo was originally considered to be a fraudulent replacement for woad, leading people to only purchasing their blue dye from reputable sources. At that point, I would argue, woad was more valuable than indigo precisely because it had a lower output. It wasn't (only) about the color, it was about the exclusivity of the pigment.

Color Science

At roughly the same time Newton was publishing Opticks, synthentic colors began to be discovered, starting with Prussian Blue. English scientists followed suit with their own versions, and we saw how it was the used to create the cyanotype, which led to the invention of the blueprint.

In the late 1850s, aniline dyes like mauve (England) and magenta (France) were discovered. But they weren't just discovered. People became obsessed with them. I've also noted that by the middle of the 1860s, the aniline palette included blue and purple dyes, referred to as Hofmann's Violets, due to scientific research done in England.

Prior to this, indigo's main competitor was woad, and its luxury imported nature was partially due to the reduction of cost it would take to manufacture any blue items. By insisting on the color copyright, while beginning a PR offensive against the efficacy of aniline blues, not realizing that aniline colors had a better backstory than the all the blood shed and violence in India, and the aniline colors were largely born in Britain.

Color Confusion

How could I say that we don't have the color indigo anymore, doesn't Crayola have an indigo crayon?

By the time they released an indigo crayon (I believe in 1999), no one really knew or cared what color indigo was anymore. They just knew it was somewhere on the color wheel between blue and purple.

I posted a little video on Instagram yesterday to help show the difference between Crayola's indigo (which is not indigo) and Crayola's denim (which does seem to be much closer to indigo).