Lead paint is the stuff of nightmares when it comes to buying a home and raising children. Flakes of paint to be inhaled or ingested, it’s unsettling. But lead’s importance in society, and the arts especially, may surprise you.
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Black. It seems simple enough. The absence of colors. That’s if you’re dealing with light, anyways. When it comes to pigment, black actually has to absorb light, and mastering that requires science.
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Glow in the dark paint first hit the scene in the early 1900’s with the arrival of Undark - a hot new paint pigment. And when I say hot, I mean HOT. This UV-reactive pigment was made with radium-226, and as the name implies -- radium is radioactive.
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In the 1930’s, a doctor by the name of Frank Cyr wanted to implement standards for school transportation. During this period, the end of the great depression, kids were brought into school by all sorts of vehicles, including wagons, trucks, and buses. Cyr wanted to incorporate a standard color that improved visibility of these vehicles there by differentiating them from other traffic.
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The color was affordable and available. Because of this, manufacturers began using it in everything from wallpaper to birthday candles. But Scheele’s Green had a secret.
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