Variations of a blue pigment were developed at Oregon State University. (Photo: Mas Subramanian)
Blue is sometimes not an easy color to make.
Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat).
So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident.
The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with other chemicals and heating them to high temperatures.
Then Mas Subramanian, a professor of material sciences, noticed that one of the samples that a graduate student had just taken out of the furnace was blue.
“I was shocked, actually,” Dr. Subramanian said.
Kenneth Chang
New York Times
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 25, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Maureen
Oh, that blue!
The writer at In Pursuit of Excellence wrote in August about a ceramist’s 15-year search to create a yellow. The artist succeeded and took the formula with him when he died. Fascinating.
April 7, 2011 at 2:17 am
Ersen Numer
The researchers are trying to replace the indium oxide with cheaper oxides like aluminum oxide, which possesses similar properties.
Since the time of this writing, has there been any additional discoveries with using cheaper materials? It would seem to me, that with the speed of science, there would be many options to recreate this with the cheaper oxides.