The names of those colors we may refer to as “basic” (namely white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, gray) have all remote origins in the past, in almost every language that possess them. There are very interesting studies[note a] showing how different terms were incorporated in order to improve the precision in a color’s description. In fact, calling those colors “basic” is not a whimsical decision: in every modern language, that list has (almost invariably) between 10 and 12 colors.
On the other hand, people who are not related to the world of printing usually get perplexed when they hear for the first time the existence of colors like cyan and, specially, magenta. Perplexity ceases when they become aware that the first one is a “kind of strong, light blue” while the second is an “intense pink”. However, out of them, magenta occasionally suffers from being considered “not a real color”[note b]. Those who make such statement (leaving aside the absolute nonsense of that phrase) call our attention to the fact that it does not appear in the visible spectrum:
Fact is, unlike other colors having some “representative” in the visible spectrum, magenta (being a high saturated color) does not appear there because it can only be obtained by mixing blue and red lights. In more technical terms, there is no single light wavelength we can call it magenta. But if that fact were enough to disqualify it, then colors as white, black, gray, brown and a myriad of other ones should be eradicated from the universe of colors. Of course it’s not like that: color is anything our brain perceives as such (that’s right dear reader, color is a sensation, not far away from sadness or happiness…) and its physical side is just a fraction of the story; the rest takes place inside our amazing visual system.
Those weird new colors
Certain activities of man, closer in time, such as trade of precious gems and the textile industry, brought us other names for some variants of the basic colors. For instance, consider turquoise (kind of a highly saturated blue-green), a word dated back to the seventeenth century and used to refer to both a mineral mainly coming from current Iran and Afghanistan and its color, traded through Turkey, and so believed to be Turkish (turquoise in French). Or consider other names which became obsolete, like amaranth, an intermediate color between red and deep pink, a word taken from the flower of the same name, in turn from Greek for “non-fading flower”. And maybe someone still remember ultramarine (also ultramarine blue), a pigment obtained from a gem called lapis lazuli which came “from beyond the sea” (Latin: ultra-mar), in reference to mines of Afghanistan where it were extracted.
Many of those colors had in common that in order to produce them in the form of dyes or pigments they required very expensive supplies coming invariably from zones far away from Europe. Growing demand for those colors, along with the transportation costs of corresponding supplies, make their use quite onerous. This situation created a strong need for getting synthetic substitutes, but it was necessary to wait until nineteenth century for chemistry to be developed enough to make that possible.
The story begins just there…
The colors of tar
One of the many consequences of Industrial Revolution was the generation of a growing amount of a substance called coal tar, a by-product of the production of coke (required for feeding steam machines) from coal. In small quantities it was already known since the seventeenth century and used as medicine since nineteenth century, but chemists of that time were forced to study this substance closer, mainly because it was difficult to dispose without severe impact on the environment[note c]. Those studies prove useful: In 1825 Michael Faraday found one of its components, benzene, and in 1834 Friedlieb Runge isolated a blue pigment he called cyanol (from Greek kyanos, the name of lapis lazuli, from which it was derived our well-known cyan). These discoveries leveraged a search for synthetic dyes and pigments from tar and created a whole industry by itself.
In 1842 another compound was derived from benzene, benzidam, better known as aniline. The latter was systematically analyzed for making pigments. It proved to have an enormous potential: there is a 100+ pages book[note d] containing a list of every color (along with its industrial denomination) of all pigments that were able to be synthesized from tar, precursor to aniline.
Going crazy for a color
The first pigment with a color closer to our current magenta was just obtained from aniline, but in fact it was found when its discoverer was looking for something else…
In the mid-nineteenth century, English soldiers at India were terribly affected by malaria, and the only known medicine for that disease was quinine, a substance obtained from the bark of the cinchona, a tree native to the jungles of South America. At those times it had to be brought from Peru, which made quite expensive to keep a regular stock.
In 1856, William Perkin, a 18 year old chemistry student, was working with August von Hofmann, a German chemist with considerable contributions to organic chemistry, who had theorized about the possibility of synthesizing quinine. Hofmann asked Perkin to make some experiments in that direction.
In one of those experiments Perkin combined aniline with potassium dichromate, resulting in a black substance. Usually such an outcome, for chemists of the time, was a sign of a failed reaction. Willing to start over again, Perkin began to clean the flasks used in the experiment with alcohol, and he observed some parts of the resulting solution produced an intense purple substance. Soon after that he discovered that a piece of silk dyed with that substance acquired that purple color in a lasting way. Immediately Perkin patented his discovery, originally called aniline purple, and started its mass production. Shortly after (marketing reasons maybe?) this dye was called mauveine in France and England, from the color of mallow flower (French mauve).
Chronicles of the time point out that a “mauveine epidemic” took over Europe. Between 1859 and 1861 it was a fashion must-have[note e], and jokes were made comparing the craziness for this new color with measles.
The battle of Magenta
Story takes us now from chemistry to geopolitics[note f]. By the end of the 1850’s, what we know today as Italy was no more than a handful of small kingdoms barely united by a common cultural heritage dating back to the Roman Empire. One of those kingdoms, perhaps the most powerful one among them relatively, was the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Its first minister, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, was also a nationalist seeking for Italy unification. There was an impediment for that: the dominance of the Kingdom of Austria over those territories. Skilled strategist and politician, Benso knows he needs an alliance with some powerful partner to reach that goal. He had already prepared the ground: his troops had collaborated with the French at the Crimean War against the Russians, and therefore he was in position to seek an alliance with France. French Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, having the political need to consolidate his power and live up to his uncle’s fame, reached with Benso a secret agreement: France would not start a war with Austria, unless they was “forced” to defend a friend territory. As compensation, French would receive the regions of Savoy and Nice, with the only condition their inhabitants accepted that in a referendum.
Benso devised a simple yet effective plan. He mobilized troops and ordered some military maneuvers close to the Lombardy border, a region occupied by Austria. The enemy emperor, Franz Josef I, took the bait and sent an ultimatum to Piedmont. Predictably, Benso rejected it and on April 27th 1859 Austria declared war, forcing France to enter the conflict.
Further development of the hostilities ends in two decisive battles. On June 4th, a long and bloody battle was fought at the city of Magenta, Lombardy, which finished with a last-minute French victory and forced Austrians to retreat and regroup. The pride for having defeated an empire such as Austria’s and a true possibility of creating the Italian nation went deep in Italians and French alike.
Far away in the distance, French chemists, following the path opened by Perkin, continued obtaining novel pigments. Do you recall von Hoffman, Perkin’s teacher? He himself had obtained a new dye from aniline and carbon tetrachloride in 1858, but another chemist, François-Emmanuel Verguin, independently found it and patented it initially as fucsine, for the color of the fucsia flower. News about the battle suggested a change in that name for something evoking the strength and courage displayed there: the new color was called magenta.
Bonus track: The battle of Solferino
The second (and definite) battle against Austrians took place a few days later, on June 24th, at the city of Solferino. Comparing to Magenta’s, this second battle lasted longer and left a larger number of casualties on both sides. Napoleon III himself, horrified by the amount of blood and bodies left on the battlefield, proposed an armistice to Austrians, who accepted shortly after.[note g]
There seems to be no concrete evidence that the color known as solferino (bright crimson dye-colour rosaniline, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) received that name because of that blood-dyed battlefield, taking into account that blood became red-brown in contact with air. Nevertheless for a while solferino was used as a synonym of magenta, although the former is more related to red, as the latter is to pink.[note h]
Incredibly, this word made its way into Argentine soccer. In the regulations of the Argentine Soccer Association (Asociación del Fútbol Argentino – AFA)[note i], more precisely in Article 10 of the Appendix about Internal Regulations of the College of Referees, we can read:
Assistant referees shall use 40 by 30 centimeters pennants, one yellow and the other one solferino (…).
That text suggest each assistant referee should be using a pennant of a different color, although this rule does not seem to be observed, and in general both of them use a red and yellow checker design instead.
How Argentine soccer appropriated that word is a mystery, but narrators often use a characteristic poetic style to refer to soccer elements: for instance, el esférico (“the spherical”) for the ball, or banderines (“pennants”) for linesmen, so they could have perfectly chosen their color with a name matching their “poetic needs…”[note k]
- Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, 1991. Authors conclude: “The results (show that) color categorization is not random and the foci of basic color terms are similar in all languages”.
- Just one of so many examples of persisting in this recurring error can be found at the Jason Walcott Fine Art blog, casually describing his own version of the history of this color.
- How a Revolutionary Textile Coloring Compound Tainted a Waterway, National Geographic.
- A Dictionary of the Coal Tar Colours, Goerge H. Hurst (1892), Google Books.
- How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World, Simon Garfield (2001), Google Books.
- Triumph of Spirit: French Emperor Napoleon III led a Franco-Sardinian army into northern Italy in the summer of 1859 determined to smite the Austrians, Warfare History Network.
- Story does not end here. A Swiss businessman, Jean-Henri Dunant, having the intention of meeting Napoleon and discuss some problems with his business in Algeria, became horrified with the humanitarian disaster he found after arriving at Solferino and entirely forgot the reason for the meeting, organized help for the wounded and even managed to involve the local population in helping with no distinction of sides. Back in Switzerland, started a process ending in the Geneva Conventions and in the foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. See History of the International Committee of the Red Cross, www.icrc.org.
- Asociación del Fútbol Argentino: General Rules, www.afa.com.ar.
- According to the Glossary of obsolete color names of English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, The Cutters Guide – 19th Century Female, solferino was considered the same as current fuchsia, while fashion saw magenta as a “bright orange”.
- Solferino: Árbitros, tinturas y filántropos, Perfil.com.
- Banderín solferino (Solferino pennant), a story by Juan Sasturain, Reeding National Plan, Ministry of Education, Argentina.
