February 25, 2020 • 45 mins
Indigo is a color with a rich past. Learn all about it today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone in podcast land. If you have ever wanted
to see us on stage telling jokes and slinging facts,
and you live out west, you can come see us
in Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, Canada. Yep, We'll be at
the Chance Center in Vancouver on Sunday, March twenty nine,
and then we'll be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
in Portland on March And if you want tickets and info,
(00:22):
then the best thing you can do right now is
to go do s y s K live dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there,
(00:43):
there's Jerry over there again. Gosh, it feels good to
have you back. Chairs Cherysa's thanks and this is stuff
you should know. The smell of mi So is back.
I love the smell of me so in the morning.
I've been doing a lot of mis lunches mm hmm,
actually just eating balls of mis no. I found a
(01:06):
I found a soup that's pretty good, like well, a
ramen and a miso that are a little because I
was thinking like man, I used to love those little
ramin's in college. It's like, I wonder if there's an
elevated version of that, and there is, Uh, I'll plug it.
Mike's mighty good ramen. It's a cup of soup, but
(01:26):
it's just a little bit better. It's made from better ingredients.
In Instead of twenty cents, it's like two dollars. Oh yeah,
it's still pretty affordable. But yeah, it's just super fast
and get some you know, low calories in your body
to stave off some food cravings. Stave off that cheeseburger craving,
you know what I mean, Yes, which can be substantial.
(01:49):
And you know what I'm also back on and this
is all just because of calorie crap. But beef turkey
is a nice little protein snack, not a ton of calories,
and squashes cravings. That one kid, um sorry, that one guy,
but he started it as a kid our listener who
makes beef jerky really top quality stuff. It was good,
(02:12):
but you know, I had my MOLDI beef jerky incident
years ago in l A. Oh that's right. This is
the first time I've had beef jerkey in fourteen years.
Because of that incident. Well you're back on the train, though,
I'm glad. Well, not like a ton, but a couple
of times a week I'll snack on some beef jurney.
That is. That's a lot. That's a lot of jerky. Yes,
a couple of times a week is a lot. I
(02:33):
mean that's like right in my wheelhouse. But it's a lot.
And the whole bag of beef jerky once, okay, two ounces? Yeah,
do you weigh it out first? I do? Do you really? Yeah?
I was on the food weighing thing for a little
while and like you can get into it's kind of
like a game. I mean just that's the only way
to track accurately. Um. Yeah, good for you, man. Thanks,
(02:56):
you're feeling good whatever, You're like, I've lost my world
of blue now it's weighing beef jerkin. It's fine. Alright, Well, everybody,
obviously we're talking about Indigo to Die in the History
of It, which to me, did you know any of
this before we started? No, So this is kind of
(03:17):
you're like, oh, this sounds interesting, let's do one on
Indigo and dug In and struck Gold. You know, I
was I was perusing the old house stuff works dot
com website um, which you know, I know we have
almost cleaned that website dry over the years, but this
one popped up and I thought interesting because this is
one of those that is like, oh, indigo, Yeah, that's
(03:40):
a color, but it's also a pigment and it has
an interesting history and also slavery and race gets involved,
so no idea. Yeah, it has a lot of tendrils
that I found interesting. Yes, Supposedly, wherever indigo went, especially
after the age of the exploration and colonization, so too
went um slavery because it was it's a really intensive
(04:04):
process and crop um to produce indigo to die very
popular crop. Yeah, and it was also a worth a
lot of money, which was like, oh, well, we'll just
um kidnap people and make them work for free and
and that's how we'll produce indigo. And that's how it
went for hundreds of years apparently. Yeah, and we'll get
to this, but there are some people that say the
(04:26):
state of Georgia legalized slavery specifically so they could kind
of keep pace with indigo as a crop. And those
people who say that are historians, that's right. So okay,
I knew zero about indigo aside from the fact that
they used it to dye jeans and that was blue basically. Um.
(04:49):
And I just found this ultimately super fascinating. Yeah. I
mean this beginning though, I thought was even more fascinating
because I never really thought about the fact that if
you look at any color up to a certain point
about the mid nineteenth century. Yeah, mid nineteenth century, was
any color you would see on a fabric or a
(05:09):
textile was there because a lot of plants and insects
We're squashed like it was an insect and plant blood
bath for eons in the world. Because if you wanted
something to be colored at all, then you had to
find a bug or a plant that you could grind
(05:30):
up into a powder basically or some other means, yeah,
or an animal, uh, like sea snails and animals, And
if you wanted purple for a very very long time,
you had to um, you had to get the mucous
gland out of a sea snail and and desiccated. And
I'm guessing that didn't end well for the sea snail. No,
(05:50):
And I imagine that's a super labor intensive thing to do.
But who, Like I guess I could see like accidentally
smashing a sea snail and be like, oh, that's a
very pretty purple. I wonder if I can use it
to do stuff with the stuff that gets me those
when you get into like indigo itself. Yeah, because it's
the fact that you can get blue out of indigo
(06:12):
is not intuitive. No, because you look at the plant,
it's not blue. You squeeze the plant, not blue, eat
the plant, poop it out, not blue. There's nothing blue
about it. You have to you have to put it
through this chemical reaction that's multi step to to get
it to be blue. And I'm likely at a loss
(06:34):
how what what series of accidents had to happen so
that like somebody came up with indigo to die because
apparently it's one of the least least natural natural dyes
in the world. Yeah. And and also and for that reason,
one of the most sought after through antiquity, because you know,
(06:57):
if they wanted to make red stuff, it's pretty easy.
There's a lot of things you can you know, get
red out of it in nature or green obviously, but blue.
You know the old thing about there being no blue foods.
What old thing? Well, the old adage there are no
blue foods. Have you ever had arctic blue gum? Well?
(07:19):
I did look into this because this doesn't make a
little sense of why blue as a pigment would be
more sought after, and I think it ties into the
fact that it's just not naturally occurring. Really, Um, I
had never thought about that, but that. Yeah, now I'm
just gonna spend the rest of the episode racking my
brain for a blue food. Well, blue corn, blue potatoes,
blue blueberries are the things that most people would say, well,
(07:39):
what about that. I never would have thought of those,
But those are technically purple. Um that on the Food
Network a few years ago, and other people have done this.
They used to spectro uh photometer photometer two look at
the true colors of foods, and even those foods are
actually purple. They brought Sydney Opera and be like, yeah,
(08:01):
it's purple. I don't get it. She had that song
true Colors. Okay, I was thinking true blue. I was like,
that's my daughter. Did you just add an r Onto
the end of Madonna? Yeah, but that's a reservoir dogs reference. Um,
thank you for explaining it. I didn't have to see
like multiple emails two weeks from now with people being
(08:21):
like great reservoir dogs reference Chuck. So the blue food thing,
supposedly people think that blue light is one of the
high energy wavelengths on the on the light spectrum, on
the visible light spectrum, and that the guesses is to
grow more efficiently plants absorbed that light and use that energy. Well, yeah,
because the blue end is is higher energy. Yes, I'm
(08:43):
pretty sure. Yes, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and
that was what we were talking about in the about
the blue blood. Yes, but that's the opposite of that.
It absorbs more red, so it reflects more blue. Interesting,
so if it was blue, it would it would absorb
less blue light. I don't know, I know, it's kind
(09:04):
of like a mind sure, a brain teaser, right there
you go. But at any rate, there are very supposedly
no true blue foods, and that's probably ties into the
fact there are not a lot of plants that were
true blue. And as if you wanted something blue back then, uh,
(09:25):
you had to get it from woade, which is a
If you look at those, it's got yellow flowers again,
not blue. If there was ever a medieval English word,
I love it for that. It sounds like a little
uh a little short, hairy stubby, that little woe man
with big feet who wears like a tunic, that's a
(09:46):
woad or the more um are the prettier named Indigo fera,
which is a family of plants in India and South America,
both of those that has like a pinkish flower. But
both of those is where you used get indigo. Yeah,
And what's weird about this also is not only like
to neither of these plants look like they would produce
(10:07):
blue dye, but neither one of them are actually particularly
good at dyeing fabric. They both resist binding to fabric
or um dissolving in water. Hence the reason why you
don't just like squeeze wode or an intego ferra plant
um and get blue dye. You have to run it
(10:28):
through this process that starts with fermentation. Even yeah, and squeezing,
squeezing your wode sounds it sounds like something else. Yeah,
So we don't know for sure. We think they've been
making indigo from wode longer than from the Indigo ferra plant.
I think now we we can't say the word woude
anymore for the rest of the episode. I think you're right,
(10:51):
but it's you know, we can't really tell sometimes whether
it was woade or the indigo ferra. That they do
think because Egypt and Mesopotamia are close to Turkey and
they had a lot of blue uh and in Turkey
they had more woad than indigo ferra, So they think
that was probably the first one. Yeah. So the upshot
of all that is that they can trace blue die
(11:12):
back to the third millennium b c. Five thousand years
ago or up to five thousand years ago, but they
can't say whether it came from wood or indigo ferre right, right,
But they did find indigo ferra in the Bronze Age
in the Indus Valley civilization. And this was fascinating to
me just because the um the horror Pon. I guess
(11:36):
it's one of the same, the Indus Valley civilization and
the that that what you just said, Yes, they're they're
the same thing, right, Yes, they're the Harpon civilization that
was one of maybe the largest ever ancient civilization. And
I'm just fascinating anytime we talk about these civilizations back then,
add like as many as five million people, It's just
(11:56):
blows my mind. They also had indoor plumbing, underground sewage
like they had it going on. They apparently had a
better standard of living um than contemporary Egyptians at the
same time. And everybody thinks that the Egyptians having it
going on too. Yeah please, yeah, I guess not compared
(12:17):
to the Indus Valley civilization. So um, there is lots
of examples of this stuff. Um. Yeah, Indigo fera or
wode they kind of competed for a very long time,
and Europe kind of went the Woade way because wade
grows in um in Europe much more easily related to
(12:37):
the cabbage family. They took the load less traveled. That
was good, um, and then that was really good. And
then indigo fera grows better in like Pakistan, India that
that area the Indus Valley um, and so that that
was kind of like the split in blue dye. The
thing is, there seems to have always been this understanding
(12:58):
that indigo fair is just vastly superior to woade indigo um.
And so even in Europe, like you would find woade
like the Greeks, the Romans, and then up to medieval Europeans,
if they could get their hands on indigo ferra, indigo
that um. They would pay through the nose for that stuff.
(13:19):
Um and rightly. So, I mean like it was really
expensive because it's hard to produce, as we'll see um.
But also at the time you had to travel over
land carrying the stuff, and so each trader that went
along these trade rush just added more and more money
on too. So by the time it reached a western Europe,
you were paying a lot for this blue dive. One
million dollars. They would be like that that number doesn't
(13:42):
even exist yet. So the Greeks they called and this
is going down a bit of a a word origin
rabbit hole. But the Greeks called the blue pigment indecon
with a K because it was from India and they
wanted it to sound sinister because things were the K
that became indigo in English. And then there's the word
(14:04):
for die in ancient lands uh in i l i
neely that was Sanskrit meaning dark blue, and then that
became a n i l in Spanish, and eventually that
became indigo in Central and South America. And apparently, yeah,
blue in Arabic is al neil right, in English, uh
(14:28):
annualine is derived from that, and that is synthetic die class.
So it's all tied together. We got to climb right
out of this hole. Yes, that was a big one. So, um,
where are we in the ancient world? Well, I think
we're in Marco Polo? Okay, good so and twelve the
(14:50):
late twelve hundreds, the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo made
his way to China and was like, hey, get this.
We had to say something. This is me talking, not
Marco Polo, but um, they had, like the Romans, the Greeks,
the Europeans had no idea that indigo came from a plant,
(15:12):
because by the time I got to them, it was
like these little hard um bits of die and you
would mix with water at about solution and there you
had your die. All of a sudden, um, But they
thought it was a mineral. Marco Polo went to China,
saw some of this stuff firsthand. I was like, hey,
this comes from a plant. Did you guys know that?
(15:33):
And by the way, I got a bunch of my
boat if you want to buy something, And all of
a sudden there was trade now with with China. Yeah,
and that went. It was still pretty expensive because there
was no direct sea route to China. Until Vasco da
Gama came along and said watch this, Yeah, I'll sail
to China in like two seconds. Everyone was very impressed.
(15:55):
And this kind of cut out the middleman in all
those hands. Like you were saying, raising the prices along
the way, you cut out a lot of those and
you've got more supply. And even back then that those
economics meant cheaper prices would follow, right, isn't Fosco da
Gama George Costanza's favorite explorer? I can't remember. I was
(16:17):
just wondering that. I want to say it is, but
I thought it was Cortez. Now no, no, no, everybody
hates Cortez. Who was Jerry's I don't remember which one.
I think one of them was impressed about going around
the Horn of Africa majelling. Maybe I'll have to look
that all. What's the door Steinfeld research on that for you?
(16:38):
So the cost of Indigo dropped a lot because of
the da Gama but but not like rock bottom luxury,
like the point zero one percent could afforded to you know,
could afford kind of something like that. Yeah, But what
that meant was is Woade was in big double because
(17:01):
Indigo from the Indigo ferra was the blue gold, said,
what is me? All right, let's take a break and
we'll talk about the synthesization synthetization. Good God, am I
dreaming right now? I think? So? Good night? Okay. So
(17:38):
you said that they call it blue gold, right, or
they did back in the age of Vasco da Gama.
That's right because it was worth a lot of money.
It lasted along and had a good shelf life, and
it wasn't you know, huge. It was pretty compact as
far as storing and traveling, super compact. So um, if
you'll indulge me, like I found a little bit about
how that stuff that they used to to travel with
(18:00):
was made. Yeah, and it's still if it's going to
be made naturally, which it really isn't. This is how
they would still do it, right. Someone figured this out
thousands of years ago and still today from what we understand,
the process is virtually the same. So the whole thing
starts with a whole bunch of indigo ferra um plant um,
(18:21):
and you throw it into a pot and you start
to ferment it. Step one. Somebody figured out how to
ferment or that you need to ferment indigo. I bet
someone drank it at some point, yes, and they're like,
chuck out my teeth. Have you ever seen teeth like these?
So here's the thing, the reason why you can't just
(18:41):
squeeze an indigo ferra plant and get indigo outs because
there's no indigo in the plant. It doesn't exist naturally.
But there's a precursor to it called indi can um,
and that is what you ferment out of the um
leaves with an enzyme which kind of breaks it down,
and all of a sudden, um you have something called
(19:03):
endoxyl and glucose. That's right, so you're splitting it. This
endoxyl is what you're actually after. And then after that
you drain the liquid um and into a second tank
you add the endoxyl um with air. You stir it basically,
and all of a sudden it oxidizes into intogotten and
(19:23):
then the into gotten is actually what um apparently is indigo.
Because there's no other steps after that except to let
it air dry. It like settles at the bottom and
then they can get rid of the uh, the matter
on top. Yeah, they filter it out and you're left
with kind of a sludgy paste, I think, right, Yeah,
(19:44):
And then if you dry that paste in the sun,
which I think is the traditional customary way supposedly, that
converts it into basically like blocky, solid indigo die. Okay,
so it's not a powder, it says cakes. And then
the fact that the but I've seen it as a powder,
so I know what you're talking about. But I think
the fact that the Romans and Greeks thought it was
(20:05):
a mineral because it must be hard. But surely, I mean,
it's got a breakdown somehow. But what's weird about all
this is if you take that that indigo die and
you say, like, soak some denomen in it, it's not
just going to come out blue, certainly, not after one.
(20:26):
If you're using natural indigo die, you have to, um
I've seen up to forty times. You have to wash
it in this indigo to get it to start to bind.
Because one of the things about indigo is it doesn't
like to bind with fibers. And then even when it does,
it's very superficial. So like if you took your genes
right now, cut it open, you looked at the cross section,
(20:50):
you'd see white inside. It's just the superficial top of
the fiber of your genes that have been die blue
inside the indigo hasn't actually kind of traded, and I
would be wearing some sweet daisy dukes you would with
like the pockets sticking out of the bottom. No, I
never went that short. I would cut off Geane phase,
(21:10):
but never the Georgs. It was always had the frayed bottoms,
kind of country style, nothing nothing hemmed. Oh yeah, yeah,
I never never owned appear No, no, no, I know
what you're talking about. George didn't either. Actually it's not true,
but mine was at a time where they were acceptable. Yes, okay, yeah,
(21:31):
I buy that. I don't. It's not like I was like, oh,
I'm not going to wear those because theydn't even call
them George back then. I think I just didn't have them.
What you're describing is not what I have. Mine were
bag here, but they had like a hem like the
bottom of jeans did but they weren't at all the
tebow George. Yes, yes, I didn't look anything like that here.
(21:52):
I need to see what that looks like. Just imagine
like nineties Geene shorts. Okay, there you go, you got it.
Sort of we'll just leave it there, all right, Okay, Uh,
we don't know. Let's just smoove on. So Chuck just
put his glasses on. Everybody. That's right, because I'm reading.
My eyes have gotten so bad. Mine have to Chuck.
(22:14):
I can't, like, I can't read anything now unless I
have them. I have to go like this, and it
makes it really hard to underline and highlight when you
hold like Josh's holding a page very far from his
face and then close and then it's really sad. So, uh,
I guess we should get into the dark side of
And I think this was one of the parts from
(22:37):
the house Stuff Works article they said some of that.
I had some NPR in there, and I think a
fashion website even chimed in. That's a heck of a
So when Europeans kind of like colonized North America colonialized,
they started obviously they needed to grow crops and sell
(22:59):
them for any That was a big deal was farming.
So they were like, what should we grow, Like we've
never been here before. Yeah, that's like you don't think
about that, but that's exactly kind of what they went through.
And they tried a bunch of different stuff, and they
did grow a bunch of different stuff, but indigo was
something that they tried to grow a lot of early on.
They grew yeah, in Jamestown, New Amsterdam, I think in Louisiana.
(23:22):
The French did it an okay job of it. But
it was a woman named Eliza Lucas in the seventeen
thirties and uh, more appropriately Eliza Lucas's slaves that figured
this out. Yeah, so she was she gets the credit.
She was a pretty interesting person herself that she was
sixteen and her father, boy, but my voice just transitioned
(23:46):
really weirdly. And her father um owned uh like at
least three plantations in around Charleston, South Carolina. Yeah, again
a British colony at the time, and he said, hey, Eliza,
you're interested in botany, why don't you go take over
these three plantations and see what will grow there. And
he sent her some seeds and she started growing stuff
(24:06):
and she found the indigo grew really really well in
the lowlands of South Carolina. Yeah, she grew ginger cotton, hemp, alfalfa,
and the aforementioned indigo. Eventually, for her efforts, she was
inducted into as the first woman into the South Carolina
Business Hall of Fame. Again she's sixteen years old at
the time. Sure she got married to a man named
(24:29):
Charles Pinkney. Um, you know, because she was an old
maid of sixteen and not married yet getting up and
they because, um, and you know, of course she'll get
I think a lot of the credit now is being shared.
But for many years she was like Eliza Lucas, the
woman who figured out how to grow indigo. Whereas the
(24:50):
true story is is Eliza Lucas um had slaves on
her plantation from Africa that knew how to grow indigo.
She's like, how do you do this? And they helped
her out. Uh they Um. To their credit, they did
share this, the plants, the seeds, the knowledge to all
kinds of other farmers. And they are kind of looked
(25:11):
at as being responsible for the indigo boom in the south, right,
So then you could extrapolate pretty easily that they were
also responsible for the introduction of slavery into the southern
cultures because the indigo started growing so well, and this
indigo boom happened. And remember this is still like a
luxury item and in high demand. Everybody wanted everything blue, blue,
(25:32):
blue blue, Give me some blue clothes right now? That
was kind of the the age in the middle of
the eighteenth century. UM. And because this crop started growing
so well in the south, and because it was so lucrative,
they think that Georgia said, oh, you know, Charleston is
doing really well with this indigo. We could be doing
well too, if only we would overturn our ban on slavery.
(25:55):
Had no idea that Georgia initially had a ban on slavery,
did you. I did not, uh, and said We're going
to start allowing slaves uh to be held in Georgia
and the Georgia colony so that we can grow indigo.
And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. In seventeen fifty one
is when the band in Georgia ended and the revolutionary
Revolutionary I keep saying that revolutionary because it was truly revolutionary.
(26:20):
The Revolutionary War came along. Um. By that point there
were eighteen thousand slaves in Georgia and Uh. The war, though,
kind of put a dent in the indigo market. Yeahs um.
So the biggest um consumer base of indigo for the
colonies was Britain, and Britain said, you don't wanna be
(26:43):
our colonies anymore. You want to be independent, go find
some other customers. And Britain said, we're gonna go take
over India and get our indigo there, right, except they
said it British, all British, British eight barby gun. That's
pretty good. I don't know if that's pretty good, governor
accurate at all. Uh. And this tie to slavery and
(27:07):
indigo was basically around until the early twenty century when
um synthetic indigo came along. Yeah. So if Eliza Lucas
Pickney kicked off the slavery boom um in the Southern colonies,
you can make a really good case that Alfred Vombayer,
a German chemist, freed a lot of slaves when he
(27:28):
found a synthetic um alternative to indigo. Yeah, and he
followed a boy, truly a boy, a teenage chemist named
William Perkins. That's up with all these teenagers don't doing stuff? Well,
they died when they were seven. Um, we both know
that's not true. Don't bother emailing everybody. Seven Club. Great
(27:51):
new show on our network from Yeah from Disgrace Lands,
Jake Brennan, Catch it Sundays on my Heart. It is
a good show though. Yeah, it's about the twenty seven Club,
the musicians who die at the age of seven. Yeah,
I feel like I think that's on our list of
to do episodes, although now it's done. So yeah, why
are we gonna rip jakeof I don't know, he'll come
(28:14):
after us, I know. So. Uh. Brittish chemist, teenage wonder
kid William Perkins, he was the first. Uh. He was
the creator of the first synthetic die, which came about
as a lot of things doing science by accident when
they're trying to do something else, in this case a
cure for malaria, right, which is teenage kid was doing
(28:35):
trying to find a cure for malaria. Pretty cool, and
he came up with something called Marvin, which produces a
bright purple and so this was the first synthetic die.
Remember up to this moment when William Perkins came along,
everything that had ever been dyed in the history of
humanity had been died using naturally sourced labor, intensive weirdo
(29:01):
processed um dies. And all of a sudden he's like, hey,
this is way easier. It's way more controlled. And because
it's controlled, you can put it into like mass production
pretty easily. Just changed everything. Yeah, and we don't have
to harvest billions of insects and grind them up into
powder or poor sea snails. Yeah. Um and so again.
(29:22):
A few years later, a couple of decades later. Uh,
funny enough, Alfred von bayer Um said I'm going to
start working on one for indigo. Oh yeah, eightolf in Uh.
In eighteen sixty five he declared that that's what he
was working on. In seven he figured it out. Yeah,
not bad years. Ah, well, what's funny? He got the
(29:44):
Nobel Prize actually for chemistry for his work on organic dies,
but also he discovered, um, barbiturous, didn't even mention it
in the Nobel Prize barbituous or synthetic dies. We'll give
it to them for synthetic dies. Wow. Yeah, chemistry, Well
it's still interesting. But back then it was just like,
(30:07):
I can make heavy duty drugs, might make synthetic dies,
and they'll inject them both and see what happened. Um,
when that launched in the natural production of indigo, was
it about nineteen thousand tons? I guess annually it doesn't
say those look like metric tons. If you ask me,
(30:27):
there's an extra and and a knee. Yeah, Let's say
it's annually and this was you mainly coming from India.
About fifteen years later, after the invention of the synthetic die,
that natural number had gone from nineteen thousand townies to
one thousand tonies. It's a pretty precipitous drop. Pretty it
hit a It hit the natural indigo market pretty hard,
(30:49):
and it had nothing to do with the demand for indigo.
It was just the synthetic indigo stepped in and just
took over very very quickly. That's right, um, And so
now it's like just a complete niche market to be
like this is actually naturally dyed with natural indigo kind
of garments. You just don't find those. Instead, almost entirely
(31:12):
everything is made with synthetic dyes. Let's take our second
break and then we'll come back and talk about how
that's just ruining everything too, because there's nothing good about
indigo apparently, correct, Charles. You're wearing jeans right now, are you?
(31:46):
Unfortunately I am as well. That's all you wear. How
many pair of jeans you got two? I have two
as well. One jean jacket show off you throw on
like a little jeane vest. You got a Canadian tuxedo
going yeah, I I but Emily made fun of me
for buying a jean jacket and that's like, I think
(32:08):
jean jackets are kind of in your Like Brennan thinks
it's cool. I bet he can rock a jean jacket
that hair, Yeah, for sure. Uh And I said, now
these are in now, and she's like, I don't know,
and I was like, no, they totally are. Like I'm
going to make it my business that they're in now.
They're in. You just don't don't wear them with gene bottoms.
What are you wearing with? Uh? Well, according to the
(32:29):
websites I looked up to prove Emily wrong, you wear
them with like khakis. You wear it with a corresponding
or a pant that doesn't jack doesn't sound right. Yeah,
khakis are like you know, I have my like maroon khakis.
You can wear it with that any anything that's not
blue jeans, basically, because again, you look like you're edging
(32:49):
really close to Canadian tuxedo. Yeah, but you know I've
seen people pull it off. Will Ferrell he worked Innadian tuxedo.
He's hilarious. He got up there, do you see that
jean getting blue jeans? But he offset it. Yeah, I
was like, because he did that whole Neil Diamond thing. Remember, no, oh,
(33:11):
one of his greatest characters from Sorrence Live is Neil
Diamond and you sorry, I mean Robert Goulay. Do you know? Okay,
this Neil Diamond makes his Robert Goulay look like like
dog poop. Really, it's yes. I don't think I ever
saw there was he did it multiple times, but there
was one where he did. A VH one storyteller is
(33:32):
Neil Diamond and like Neil Diamonds just off the rails
on like on pills and like he's got stitches for
some reason, they come loose and just beautiful. He's like
a bigoted racist who's singing about he can't really stand
as keyboard player because he's black, and his keyboard players like,
what are you talking? Yeah? It is Tim Meadows. So
(33:55):
I I I demand that everybody pressed Paul and go
watch the Neil Diamond Forever or no vh win storytellers
will Ferrell and we'll wait. I will check that out
and we're back. Okay, So where the heck are we now?
Is the environmental nightmare that is modern text, not just
(34:16):
blue jeans but textile dying period. Uh. There's a documentary
called River Blue that I have not seen yet. Sounds lovely,
but it details the chemical manufacturing process for denim specifically
where like you go to China and there are rivers
that are running blue um, which is not good for
many reasons. No, some of the reasons are that the
(34:38):
die itself makes the river blue, which blocks out sunlight.
So plants die everything. Yeah, when they when they disintegrate,
they are broken down by bacteria which stuck up all
the oxygen, which kills the fish. It's just a horrible
chain reaction. Um. Again, remember even with synthetic indigo, but
(34:59):
with natural as well. Even with synthetic indigo, that the
dye doesn't want to stick to the stuff. So you
have to use something called the mordant, which is a
bleaching agent that actually that will bind the indigo die
to the garment. Oh, I thought the mordant was because
the initial color that it gets is not the blue
that you want, so you have to keep bleaching it.
(35:19):
That's not my understanding, you know. I think it's the
thing that binds that says, hey, indigo, come on over
here and let's hang out with this this denim and
we'll stain it blue. Well, the wastewater the leftover mordants
are terrible or either acidic or their chromium or some
other kind of horrible metal that kills fish and poisons
(35:40):
the supply. Yeah, you know they spell it differently, which
is why they pronounce it differently. No, I looked it up.
How's it spelled exactly as it's pronounced. But we spell
it aluminum in the US and in Canada. Apparently the
rest of the English king world spells it alumni. Yum,
(36:02):
there's that extra syllable spelled out. Oh they say aluminium. Yeah, okay,
I didn't know that. I thought it was just aluminium, right,
but they're they're really saying aluminium, but they're just they're British,
so that would be an extra I after the end.
Aluminum aluminium, Yes, exactly, all right, But in't that fascinating
(36:24):
we spell it differently. Yeah, that's weird, But anyway, you
don't want that stuff in your water supply. And it
comes about in aces from the four billion pairs of
genes that are died every year in the world. Yeah,
jeans and geen jackets and gene hats all Canadian tuxedos.
(36:44):
That's right, But they are trying to work on this. UM.
There's a more environmentally friendly way they're there trying to
formulate UM. I did not understand this at all, So
I'm just gonna say it's magic through chemistry. I have
a feeling you're gonna want to explain it. Well, So
it's here's the thing. Do you remember, Like endoxyl is
(37:07):
what you're after when you're when you're extracting and fermenting
indigo or indigo ferra plants in indigo. So that indoxyl
it's super unstable, so it likes to buy into something.
It becomes something else. We can't use that something else.
You need the endoxyle. What they figured out is too
they genetically altered an E. Coli, a strain of E. Coli,
(37:29):
and it secretes that that precursor to endoxyl, or they
can make it secrete it right right, Yeah, they like
genetically engineered to do so UM that that precursor to endoxyl.
When you put it together UM with some other natural enzyme,
it separates that precursor into endoxyl and glucose, and then
(37:52):
all of a sudden you've got endoxyl. And what's neat
is they found that with this particular type of endoxyl,
when you expose it to air, it automatically turns into indigo. Well,
it turns into uh luke luco indigo, which is the
white indigo, which apparently is what you actually want to
make things blue. That's right, it's really confusing it. You
(38:13):
just lost me with that one. That's the deal. But
they're they're they're saying, like, we've got this thing. It's like,
this system actually works. We've engineered this bacteria to produce
basically the precursor to indigo, and then you scale it.
That's always the problem, exactly. It's exactly because big Denim
is gonna say, great, show me the numbers. Tommy Hill
(38:34):
figure is going to be like, I can't make any
money off this, and and so will an tom antoine
bugle boy. Well, they won't have anything to do with
it unless it's cost efficient. Oh that's good. Uh. And
the good thing about this is is it it uh
solves a couple of problems. Um, the chemical synthesis of
(38:55):
indigo is just bad. And then you also don't need
that mortan bleaching stage either, and all of this stuff
is running off into the rivers in China and other places.
But if you don't have that, and you just have
this nice little bacteria producing it on a massive scale,
then the denim producers will say we're on board and
the world will be saved. It's just could there be
(39:17):
anything more wrong with the world? I know, because you
start to think about like someone like someone who's vegan,
it's like really walking the walk and trying to do
the right thing, and like, I don't wear leather, no belts,
no shoes, all of this stuff. They say, maybe while
wearing their jeans or maybe not. Maybe they're like, oh,
(39:40):
and I don't. I won't wear denim either. But I
think it's all dependent on what you have researched. You
could probably research everything on your body and find some
awful practice along the way. Unless you're just sitting on
your commune making your clothes and weaving your loom and
you're just wearing like Tan Lennon's no colors, no dies.
(40:04):
You're like, because you're not gonna smash up a beetle
to get green. No, because that's not environmentally friendly either.
Beetles got a right to live. Yeah, beatles got a beetle.
You got anything else? No, it's just sad. You're right,
and I was hoping to end it on the upbeat thing,
but not this one. Yeah. You you follow the chain
of almost anything used today, and it's got some terrible thing.
(40:26):
I've got. I've got it. But that doesn't mean you
should give up. No, no, because anyway, any choice you
make that helps something continue to live did not be polluted.
It's still helping. Now you're still screwing up this other
way you don't mean to, but the other stuff that
you are doing that is helping is still helping. It
(40:46):
still saving a life, it's still promoting some healthier ecosystem somewhere,
and it's still worthwhile. I'm a big subscriber to this.
You know, you don't have to be all or nothing.
Some people are that's great, But every little bit of
good you can do is still doing good because I've
been taking the task personally over the years from listeners saying,
how can you be an advocate for dogs and eat meat? Oh? Yeah,
(41:08):
they love that one, And I'm like, you know, I'm
still helping dogs. You know, I just really love two
ounces of perfectly proportioned beef jerky was and maybe I
should be vegan. But to call me out on saying,
you know, you're a hypocrite because you're helping dogs, like, no,
helping dogs is good, period, full stop. Agreed, And they're like,
(41:29):
you know, strangling turtles with a plastic bag while they're
saying this too, because I guarantee if you drilled in chuck,
you could find something too. Yeah. Yeah, but that's not
a fruitful road to go down. No it's not chuck, No,
it's not agreed. Uh. Well, if you want to know
more about being a better person, go back and listen
to our catalog. How about that? Yeah? All of them? Um,
(41:51):
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
what is this? Oh? This is kind of a fun one.
It's a correction for you, but it's a lighthearted and
fun one. Hey, you guys, A long time listener, huge
advocate for all you do. I live in southern Maine
and frequently make the long drives to Vermont. In your
podcast helps me make that more tolerable. But I got
(42:13):
a bone to pick with Josh. Whenever the state of
Maine comes up, you guys always slide in a comment
about our state's weird and independent nature. Rightly so. But
I've now counted two times at least where Josh is
misidentified Maine as the slogan live for or Die uh,
the first time in the rank choice voting and then
more recently in AI facial recognition. I let it go then,
(42:34):
but I have to say something now, Live for you
or Die is famously New Hampshire state motto Josh, not Maine.
It's even on their license plate. Main state motto is uh,
dear a dear Ago dear a Joe Latin for eye lead.
I have no idea d I R I G O.
That suits us quite well as our state leads as
the first in the nation to use rank choice voting,
(42:57):
having the most breweries per capita, and being the state
in which the most Stephen King books take place. Again,
I love the show. Always chuckle when you call us
Maynard's weirdos. I hope you enjoyed your time in Portland
during your live episode last Wall. Now, if you excuse me,
I have to go ride my moose to the ocean
so I can catch lobsters by my lighthouse. And that
is from John Q Neo. Speaking of lighthouses, we both agreed.
(43:21):
The Lighthouse was an amazing movie. I know you just
randomly texted me, it's just so good that have you
seen The Lighthouse. I was moved to Robert Agars, just
please keep making movies. He's great, and I was. I
wish it hadn't gotten shut out of the Academy Awards.
I thought, why would it have been because it was
black and white, because it was weird, It was almost
an experimental film. But the fact that either or both
(43:43):
of them did not get nominated for Best Actor is
just ridiculous, pretty ridiculous because they were both amazing and
production design everything. Have you ever seen a more like
authentic looking film that's absolutely true Edgar's Robert Pattinson came
out and was like, we basically lived like you know,
it was whatever year it was. He was like, it
(44:05):
was awful. It's like all the stuff you see is
doing is the wheelbarrow scene that just looks miserable because
it was. Yeah, everybody, if you don't know we're talking about,
just go look up the Lighthouse and it was so
good and watch it and just watch it all the
way through. Okay, and then after that I really like this,
then go watch the Witch, which is Robert Eger's first movie.
(44:26):
That's right, his first movie was The Witch, one of
the greatest films ever made. In Pattinson is just one
of my favorite actors. He's so great. Have you seen
Good Time? Oh? Yeah, man, I couldn't believe how good
that was. Amazing. Okay, John wrote that that listener mailan
right hold on, I think it was John, Yes, John, Cuneo. John,
I can tell you that definitely in the facial recognition episode,
(44:50):
I was being I was trolling. I know for a
fact that it's New Hampshire's slogan, and if I know Josh, John,
you're going to hear that again. Yeah. I would also
guess that when I said it before in whatever other
episode I said it any Yeah, I don't remember that.
That was probably me trolling too, But if I was mistaken,
I apologize live for or die everyone. If you want
(45:10):
to get in touch with us, like John did, you
can go into Stuff you Should Know dot com, or
you can just send us an email to stuff podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello everyone in podcast land. If you have ever wanted
to see us on stage telling jokes and slinging facts,
and you live out west, you can come see us
in Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, Canada. Yep, We'll be at
the Chance Center in Vancouver on Sunday, March twenty nine,
and then we'll be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
in Portland on March And if you want tickets and info,
(00:22):
then the best thing you can do right now is
to go do s y s K live dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there,
(00:43):
there's Jerry over there again. Gosh, it feels good to
have you back. Chairs Cherysa's thanks and this is stuff
you should know. The smell of mi So is back.
I love the smell of me so in the morning.
I've been doing a lot of mis lunches mm hmm,
actually just eating balls of mis no. I found a
(01:06):
I found a soup that's pretty good, like well, a
ramen and a miso that are a little because I
was thinking like man, I used to love those little
ramin's in college. It's like, I wonder if there's an
elevated version of that, and there is, Uh, I'll plug it.
Mike's mighty good ramen. It's a cup of soup, but
(01:26):
it's just a little bit better. It's made from better ingredients.
In Instead of twenty cents, it's like two dollars. Oh yeah,
it's still pretty affordable. But yeah, it's just super fast
and get some you know, low calories in your body
to stave off some food cravings. Stave off that cheeseburger craving,
you know what I mean, Yes, which can be substantial.
(01:49):
And you know what I'm also back on and this
is all just because of calorie crap. But beef turkey
is a nice little protein snack, not a ton of calories,
and squashes cravings. That one kid, um sorry, that one guy,
but he started it as a kid our listener who
makes beef jerky really top quality stuff. It was good,
(02:12):
but you know, I had my MOLDI beef jerky incident
years ago in l A. Oh that's right. This is
the first time I've had beef jerkey in fourteen years.
Because of that incident. Well you're back on the train, though,
I'm glad. Well, not like a ton, but a couple
of times a week I'll snack on some beef jurney.
That is. That's a lot. That's a lot of jerky. Yes,
a couple of times a week is a lot. I
(02:33):
mean that's like right in my wheelhouse. But it's a lot.
And the whole bag of beef jerky once, okay, two ounces? Yeah,
do you weigh it out first? I do? Do you really? Yeah?
I was on the food weighing thing for a little
while and like you can get into it's kind of
like a game. I mean just that's the only way
to track accurately. Um. Yeah, good for you, man. Thanks,
(02:56):
you're feeling good whatever, You're like, I've lost my world
of blue now it's weighing beef jerkin. It's fine. Alright, Well, everybody,
obviously we're talking about Indigo to Die in the History
of It, which to me, did you know any of
this before we started? No, So this is kind of
(03:17):
you're like, oh, this sounds interesting, let's do one on
Indigo and dug In and struck Gold. You know, I
was I was perusing the old house stuff works dot
com website um, which you know, I know we have
almost cleaned that website dry over the years, but this
one popped up and I thought interesting because this is
one of those that is like, oh, indigo, Yeah, that's
(03:40):
a color, but it's also a pigment and it has
an interesting history and also slavery and race gets involved,
so no idea. Yeah, it has a lot of tendrils
that I found interesting. Yes, Supposedly, wherever indigo went, especially
after the age of the exploration and colonization, so too
went um slavery because it was it's a really intensive
(04:04):
process and crop um to produce indigo to die very
popular crop. Yeah, and it was also a worth a
lot of money, which was like, oh, well, we'll just
um kidnap people and make them work for free and
and that's how we'll produce indigo. And that's how it
went for hundreds of years apparently. Yeah, and we'll get
to this, but there are some people that say the
(04:26):
state of Georgia legalized slavery specifically so they could kind
of keep pace with indigo as a crop. And those
people who say that are historians, that's right. So okay,
I knew zero about indigo aside from the fact that
they used it to dye jeans and that was blue basically. Um.
(04:49):
And I just found this ultimately super fascinating. Yeah. I
mean this beginning though, I thought was even more fascinating
because I never really thought about the fact that if
you look at any color up to a certain point
about the mid nineteenth century. Yeah, mid nineteenth century, was
any color you would see on a fabric or a
(05:09):
textile was there because a lot of plants and insects
We're squashed like it was an insect and plant blood
bath for eons in the world. Because if you wanted
something to be colored at all, then you had to
find a bug or a plant that you could grind
(05:30):
up into a powder basically or some other means, yeah,
or an animal, uh, like sea snails and animals, And
if you wanted purple for a very very long time,
you had to um, you had to get the mucous
gland out of a sea snail and and desiccated. And
I'm guessing that didn't end well for the sea snail. No,
(05:50):
And I imagine that's a super labor intensive thing to do.
But who, Like I guess I could see like accidentally
smashing a sea snail and be like, oh, that's a
very pretty purple. I wonder if I can use it
to do stuff with the stuff that gets me those
when you get into like indigo itself. Yeah, because it's
the fact that you can get blue out of indigo
(06:12):
is not intuitive. No, because you look at the plant,
it's not blue. You squeeze the plant, not blue, eat
the plant, poop it out, not blue. There's nothing blue
about it. You have to you have to put it
through this chemical reaction that's multi step to to get
it to be blue. And I'm likely at a loss
(06:34):
how what what series of accidents had to happen so
that like somebody came up with indigo to die because
apparently it's one of the least least natural natural dyes
in the world. Yeah. And and also and for that reason,
one of the most sought after through antiquity, because you know,
(06:57):
if they wanted to make red stuff, it's pretty easy.
There's a lot of things you can you know, get
red out of it in nature or green obviously, but blue.
You know the old thing about there being no blue foods.
What old thing? Well, the old adage there are no
blue foods. Have you ever had arctic blue gum? Well?
(07:19):
I did look into this because this doesn't make a
little sense of why blue as a pigment would be
more sought after, and I think it ties into the
fact that it's just not naturally occurring. Really, Um, I
had never thought about that, but that. Yeah, now I'm
just gonna spend the rest of the episode racking my
brain for a blue food. Well, blue corn, blue potatoes,
blue blueberries are the things that most people would say, well,
(07:39):
what about that. I never would have thought of those,
But those are technically purple. Um that on the Food
Network a few years ago, and other people have done this.
They used to spectro uh photometer photometer two look at
the true colors of foods, and even those foods are
actually purple. They brought Sydney Opera and be like, yeah,
(08:01):
it's purple. I don't get it. She had that song
true Colors. Okay, I was thinking true blue. I was like,
that's my daughter. Did you just add an r Onto
the end of Madonna? Yeah, but that's a reservoir dogs reference. Um,
thank you for explaining it. I didn't have to see
like multiple emails two weeks from now with people being
(08:21):
like great reservoir dogs reference Chuck. So the blue food thing,
supposedly people think that blue light is one of the
high energy wavelengths on the on the light spectrum, on
the visible light spectrum, and that the guesses is to
grow more efficiently plants absorbed that light and use that energy. Well, yeah,
because the blue end is is higher energy. Yes, I'm
(08:43):
pretty sure. Yes, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and
that was what we were talking about in the about
the blue blood. Yes, but that's the opposite of that.
It absorbs more red, so it reflects more blue. Interesting,
so if it was blue, it would it would absorb
less blue light. I don't know, I know, it's kind
(09:04):
of like a mind sure, a brain teaser, right there
you go. But at any rate, there are very supposedly
no true blue foods, and that's probably ties into the
fact there are not a lot of plants that were
true blue. And as if you wanted something blue back then, uh,
(09:25):
you had to get it from woade, which is a
If you look at those, it's got yellow flowers again,
not blue. If there was ever a medieval English word,
I love it for that. It sounds like a little
uh a little short, hairy stubby, that little woe man
with big feet who wears like a tunic, that's a
(09:46):
woad or the more um are the prettier named Indigo fera,
which is a family of plants in India and South America,
both of those that has like a pinkish flower. But
both of those is where you used get indigo. Yeah,
And what's weird about this also is not only like
to neither of these plants look like they would produce
(10:07):
blue dye, but neither one of them are actually particularly
good at dyeing fabric. They both resist binding to fabric
or um dissolving in water. Hence the reason why you
don't just like squeeze wode or an intego ferra plant
um and get blue dye. You have to run it
(10:28):
through this process that starts with fermentation. Even yeah, and squeezing,
squeezing your wode sounds it sounds like something else. Yeah,
So we don't know for sure. We think they've been
making indigo from wode longer than from the Indigo ferra plant.
I think now we we can't say the word woude
anymore for the rest of the episode. I think you're right,
(10:51):
but it's you know, we can't really tell sometimes whether
it was woade or the indigo ferra. That they do
think because Egypt and Mesopotamia are close to Turkey and
they had a lot of blue uh and in Turkey
they had more woad than indigo ferra, So they think
that was probably the first one. Yeah. So the upshot
of all that is that they can trace blue die
(11:12):
back to the third millennium b c. Five thousand years
ago or up to five thousand years ago, but they
can't say whether it came from wood or indigo ferre right, right,
But they did find indigo ferra in the Bronze Age
in the Indus Valley civilization. And this was fascinating to
me just because the um the horror Pon. I guess
(11:36):
it's one of the same, the Indus Valley civilization and
the that that what you just said, Yes, they're they're
the same thing, right, Yes, they're the Harpon civilization that
was one of maybe the largest ever ancient civilization. And
I'm just fascinating anytime we talk about these civilizations back then,
add like as many as five million people, It's just
(11:56):
blows my mind. They also had indoor plumbing, underground sewage
like they had it going on. They apparently had a
better standard of living um than contemporary Egyptians at the
same time. And everybody thinks that the Egyptians having it
going on too. Yeah please, yeah, I guess not compared
(12:17):
to the Indus Valley civilization. So um, there is lots
of examples of this stuff. Um. Yeah, Indigo fera or
wode they kind of competed for a very long time,
and Europe kind of went the Woade way because wade
grows in um in Europe much more easily related to
(12:37):
the cabbage family. They took the load less traveled. That
was good, um, and then that was really good. And
then indigo fera grows better in like Pakistan, India that
that area the Indus Valley um, and so that that
was kind of like the split in blue dye. The
thing is, there seems to have always been this understanding
(12:58):
that indigo fair is just vastly superior to woade indigo um.
And so even in Europe, like you would find woade
like the Greeks, the Romans, and then up to medieval Europeans,
if they could get their hands on indigo ferra, indigo
that um. They would pay through the nose for that stuff.
(13:19):
Um and rightly. So, I mean like it was really
expensive because it's hard to produce, as we'll see um.
But also at the time you had to travel over
land carrying the stuff, and so each trader that went
along these trade rush just added more and more money
on too. So by the time it reached a western Europe,
you were paying a lot for this blue dive. One
million dollars. They would be like that that number doesn't
(13:42):
even exist yet. So the Greeks they called and this
is going down a bit of a a word origin
rabbit hole. But the Greeks called the blue pigment indecon
with a K because it was from India and they
wanted it to sound sinister because things were the K
that became indigo in English. And then there's the word
(14:04):
for die in ancient lands uh in i l i
neely that was Sanskrit meaning dark blue, and then that
became a n i l in Spanish, and eventually that
became indigo in Central and South America. And apparently, yeah,
blue in Arabic is al neil right, in English, uh
(14:28):
annualine is derived from that, and that is synthetic die class.
So it's all tied together. We got to climb right
out of this hole. Yes, that was a big one. So, um,
where are we in the ancient world? Well, I think
we're in Marco Polo? Okay, good so and twelve the
(14:50):
late twelve hundreds, the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo made
his way to China and was like, hey, get this.
We had to say something. This is me talking, not
Marco Polo, but um, they had, like the Romans, the Greeks,
the Europeans had no idea that indigo came from a plant,
(15:12):
because by the time I got to them, it was
like these little hard um bits of die and you
would mix with water at about solution and there you
had your die. All of a sudden, um, But they
thought it was a mineral. Marco Polo went to China,
saw some of this stuff firsthand. I was like, hey,
this comes from a plant. Did you guys know that?
(15:33):
And by the way, I got a bunch of my
boat if you want to buy something, And all of
a sudden there was trade now with with China. Yeah,
and that went. It was still pretty expensive because there
was no direct sea route to China. Until Vasco da
Gama came along and said watch this, Yeah, I'll sail
to China in like two seconds. Everyone was very impressed.
(15:55):
And this kind of cut out the middleman in all
those hands. Like you were saying, raising the prices along
the way, you cut out a lot of those and
you've got more supply. And even back then that those
economics meant cheaper prices would follow, right, isn't Fosco da
Gama George Costanza's favorite explorer? I can't remember. I was
(16:17):
just wondering that. I want to say it is, but
I thought it was Cortez. Now no, no, no, everybody
hates Cortez. Who was Jerry's I don't remember which one.
I think one of them was impressed about going around
the Horn of Africa majelling. Maybe I'll have to look
that all. What's the door Steinfeld research on that for you?
(16:38):
So the cost of Indigo dropped a lot because of
the da Gama but but not like rock bottom luxury,
like the point zero one percent could afforded to you know,
could afford kind of something like that. Yeah, But what
that meant was is Woade was in big double because
(17:01):
Indigo from the Indigo ferra was the blue gold, said,
what is me? All right, let's take a break and
we'll talk about the synthesization synthetization. Good God, am I
dreaming right now? I think? So? Good night? Okay. So
(17:38):
you said that they call it blue gold, right, or
they did back in the age of Vasco da Gama.
That's right because it was worth a lot of money.
It lasted along and had a good shelf life, and
it wasn't you know, huge. It was pretty compact as
far as storing and traveling, super compact. So um, if
you'll indulge me, like I found a little bit about
how that stuff that they used to to travel with
(18:00):
was made. Yeah, and it's still if it's going to
be made naturally, which it really isn't. This is how
they would still do it, right. Someone figured this out
thousands of years ago and still today from what we understand,
the process is virtually the same. So the whole thing
starts with a whole bunch of indigo ferra um plant um,
(18:21):
and you throw it into a pot and you start
to ferment it. Step one. Somebody figured out how to
ferment or that you need to ferment indigo. I bet
someone drank it at some point, yes, and they're like,
chuck out my teeth. Have you ever seen teeth like these?
So here's the thing, the reason why you can't just
(18:41):
squeeze an indigo ferra plant and get indigo outs because
there's no indigo in the plant. It doesn't exist naturally.
But there's a precursor to it called indi can um,
and that is what you ferment out of the um
leaves with an enzyme which kind of breaks it down,
and all of a sudden, um you have something called
(19:03):
endoxyl and glucose. That's right, so you're splitting it. This
endoxyl is what you're actually after. And then after that
you drain the liquid um and into a second tank
you add the endoxyl um with air. You stir it basically,
and all of a sudden it oxidizes into intogotten and
(19:23):
then the into gotten is actually what um apparently is indigo.
Because there's no other steps after that except to let
it air dry. It like settles at the bottom and
then they can get rid of the uh, the matter
on top. Yeah, they filter it out and you're left
with kind of a sludgy paste, I think, right, Yeah,
(19:44):
And then if you dry that paste in the sun,
which I think is the traditional customary way supposedly, that
converts it into basically like blocky, solid indigo die. Okay,
so it's not a powder, it says cakes. And then
the fact that the but I've seen it as a powder,
so I know what you're talking about. But I think
the fact that the Romans and Greeks thought it was
(20:05):
a mineral because it must be hard. But surely, I mean,
it's got a breakdown somehow. But what's weird about all
this is if you take that that indigo die and
you say, like, soak some denomen in it, it's not
just going to come out blue, certainly, not after one.
(20:26):
If you're using natural indigo die, you have to, um
I've seen up to forty times. You have to wash
it in this indigo to get it to start to bind.
Because one of the things about indigo is it doesn't
like to bind with fibers. And then even when it does,
it's very superficial. So like if you took your genes
right now, cut it open, you looked at the cross section,
(20:50):
you'd see white inside. It's just the superficial top of
the fiber of your genes that have been die blue
inside the indigo hasn't actually kind of traded, and I
would be wearing some sweet daisy dukes you would with
like the pockets sticking out of the bottom. No, I
never went that short. I would cut off Geane phase,
(21:10):
but never the Georgs. It was always had the frayed bottoms,
kind of country style, nothing nothing hemmed. Oh yeah, yeah,
I never never owned appear No, no, no, I know
what you're talking about. George didn't either. Actually it's not true,
but mine was at a time where they were acceptable. Yes, okay, yeah,
(21:31):
I buy that. I don't. It's not like I was like, oh,
I'm not going to wear those because theydn't even call
them George back then. I think I just didn't have them.
What you're describing is not what I have. Mine were
bag here, but they had like a hem like the
bottom of jeans did but they weren't at all the
tebow George. Yes, yes, I didn't look anything like that here.
(21:52):
I need to see what that looks like. Just imagine
like nineties Geene shorts. Okay, there you go, you got it.
Sort of we'll just leave it there, all right, Okay, Uh,
we don't know. Let's just smoove on. So Chuck just
put his glasses on. Everybody. That's right, because I'm reading.
My eyes have gotten so bad. Mine have to Chuck.
(22:14):
I can't, like, I can't read anything now unless I
have them. I have to go like this, and it
makes it really hard to underline and highlight when you
hold like Josh's holding a page very far from his
face and then close and then it's really sad. So, uh,
I guess we should get into the dark side of
And I think this was one of the parts from
(22:37):
the house Stuff Works article they said some of that.
I had some NPR in there, and I think a
fashion website even chimed in. That's a heck of a
So when Europeans kind of like colonized North America colonialized,
they started obviously they needed to grow crops and sell
(22:59):
them for any That was a big deal was farming.
So they were like, what should we grow, Like we've
never been here before. Yeah, that's like you don't think
about that, but that's exactly kind of what they went through.
And they tried a bunch of different stuff, and they
did grow a bunch of different stuff, but indigo was
something that they tried to grow a lot of early on.
They grew yeah, in Jamestown, New Amsterdam, I think in Louisiana.
(23:22):
The French did it an okay job of it. But
it was a woman named Eliza Lucas in the seventeen
thirties and uh, more appropriately Eliza Lucas's slaves that figured
this out. Yeah, so she was she gets the credit.
She was a pretty interesting person herself that she was
sixteen and her father, boy, but my voice just transitioned
(23:46):
really weirdly. And her father um owned uh like at
least three plantations in around Charleston, South Carolina. Yeah, again
a British colony at the time, and he said, hey, Eliza,
you're interested in botany, why don't you go take over
these three plantations and see what will grow there. And
he sent her some seeds and she started growing stuff
(24:06):
and she found the indigo grew really really well in
the lowlands of South Carolina. Yeah, she grew ginger cotton, hemp, alfalfa,
and the aforementioned indigo. Eventually, for her efforts, she was
inducted into as the first woman into the South Carolina
Business Hall of Fame. Again she's sixteen years old at
the time. Sure she got married to a man named
(24:29):
Charles Pinkney. Um, you know, because she was an old
maid of sixteen and not married yet getting up and
they because, um, and you know, of course she'll get
I think a lot of the credit now is being shared.
But for many years she was like Eliza Lucas, the
woman who figured out how to grow indigo. Whereas the
(24:50):
true story is is Eliza Lucas um had slaves on
her plantation from Africa that knew how to grow indigo.
She's like, how do you do this? And they helped
her out. Uh they Um. To their credit, they did
share this, the plants, the seeds, the knowledge to all
kinds of other farmers. And they are kind of looked
(25:11):
at as being responsible for the indigo boom in the south, right,
So then you could extrapolate pretty easily that they were
also responsible for the introduction of slavery into the southern
cultures because the indigo started growing so well, and this
indigo boom happened. And remember this is still like a
luxury item and in high demand. Everybody wanted everything blue, blue,
(25:32):
blue blue, Give me some blue clothes right now? That
was kind of the the age in the middle of
the eighteenth century. UM. And because this crop started growing
so well in the south, and because it was so lucrative,
they think that Georgia said, oh, you know, Charleston is
doing really well with this indigo. We could be doing
well too, if only we would overturn our ban on slavery.
(25:55):
Had no idea that Georgia initially had a ban on slavery,
did you. I did not, uh, and said We're going
to start allowing slaves uh to be held in Georgia
and the Georgia colony so that we can grow indigo.
And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. In seventeen fifty one
is when the band in Georgia ended and the revolutionary
Revolutionary I keep saying that revolutionary because it was truly revolutionary.
(26:20):
The Revolutionary War came along. Um. By that point there
were eighteen thousand slaves in Georgia and Uh. The war, though,
kind of put a dent in the indigo market. Yeahs um.
So the biggest um consumer base of indigo for the
colonies was Britain, and Britain said, you don't wanna be
(26:43):
our colonies anymore. You want to be independent, go find
some other customers. And Britain said, we're gonna go take
over India and get our indigo there, right, except they
said it British, all British, British eight barby gun. That's
pretty good. I don't know if that's pretty good, governor
accurate at all. Uh. And this tie to slavery and
(27:07):
indigo was basically around until the early twenty century when
um synthetic indigo came along. Yeah. So if Eliza Lucas
Pickney kicked off the slavery boom um in the Southern colonies,
you can make a really good case that Alfred Vombayer,
a German chemist, freed a lot of slaves when he
(27:28):
found a synthetic um alternative to indigo. Yeah, and he
followed a boy, truly a boy, a teenage chemist named
William Perkins. That's up with all these teenagers don't doing stuff? Well,
they died when they were seven. Um, we both know
that's not true. Don't bother emailing everybody. Seven Club. Great
(27:51):
new show on our network from Yeah from Disgrace Lands,
Jake Brennan, Catch it Sundays on my Heart. It is
a good show though. Yeah, it's about the twenty seven Club,
the musicians who die at the age of seven. Yeah,
I feel like I think that's on our list of
to do episodes, although now it's done. So yeah, why
are we gonna rip jakeof I don't know, he'll come
(28:14):
after us, I know. So. Uh. Brittish chemist, teenage wonder
kid William Perkins, he was the first. Uh. He was
the creator of the first synthetic die, which came about
as a lot of things doing science by accident when
they're trying to do something else, in this case a
cure for malaria, right, which is teenage kid was doing
(28:35):
trying to find a cure for malaria. Pretty cool, and
he came up with something called Marvin, which produces a
bright purple and so this was the first synthetic die.
Remember up to this moment when William Perkins came along,
everything that had ever been dyed in the history of
humanity had been died using naturally sourced labor, intensive weirdo
(29:01):
processed um dies. And all of a sudden he's like, hey,
this is way easier. It's way more controlled. And because
it's controlled, you can put it into like mass production
pretty easily. Just changed everything. Yeah, and we don't have
to harvest billions of insects and grind them up into
powder or poor sea snails. Yeah. Um and so again.
(29:22):
A few years later, a couple of decades later. Uh,
funny enough, Alfred von bayer Um said I'm going to
start working on one for indigo. Oh yeah, eightolf in Uh.
In eighteen sixty five he declared that that's what he
was working on. In seven he figured it out. Yeah,
not bad years. Ah, well, what's funny? He got the
(29:44):
Nobel Prize actually for chemistry for his work on organic dies,
but also he discovered, um, barbiturous, didn't even mention it
in the Nobel Prize barbituous or synthetic dies. We'll give
it to them for synthetic dies. Wow. Yeah, chemistry, Well
it's still interesting. But back then it was just like,
(30:07):
I can make heavy duty drugs, might make synthetic dies,
and they'll inject them both and see what happened. Um,
when that launched in the natural production of indigo, was
it about nineteen thousand tons? I guess annually it doesn't
say those look like metric tons. If you ask me,
(30:27):
there's an extra and and a knee. Yeah, Let's say
it's annually and this was you mainly coming from India.
About fifteen years later, after the invention of the synthetic die,
that natural number had gone from nineteen thousand townies to
one thousand tonies. It's a pretty precipitous drop. Pretty it
hit a It hit the natural indigo market pretty hard,
(30:49):
and it had nothing to do with the demand for indigo.
It was just the synthetic indigo stepped in and just
took over very very quickly. That's right, um, And so
now it's like just a complete niche market to be
like this is actually naturally dyed with natural indigo kind
of garments. You just don't find those. Instead, almost entirely
(31:12):
everything is made with synthetic dyes. Let's take our second
break and then we'll come back and talk about how
that's just ruining everything too, because there's nothing good about
indigo apparently, correct, Charles. You're wearing jeans right now, are you?
(31:46):
Unfortunately I am as well. That's all you wear. How
many pair of jeans you got two? I have two
as well. One jean jacket show off you throw on
like a little jeane vest. You got a Canadian tuxedo
going yeah, I I but Emily made fun of me
for buying a jean jacket and that's like, I think
(32:08):
jean jackets are kind of in your Like Brennan thinks
it's cool. I bet he can rock a jean jacket
that hair, Yeah, for sure. Uh And I said, now
these are in now, and she's like, I don't know,
and I was like, no, they totally are. Like I'm
going to make it my business that they're in now.
They're in. You just don't don't wear them with gene bottoms.
What are you wearing with? Uh? Well, according to the
(32:29):
websites I looked up to prove Emily wrong, you wear
them with like khakis. You wear it with a corresponding
or a pant that doesn't jack doesn't sound right. Yeah,
khakis are like you know, I have my like maroon khakis.
You can wear it with that any anything that's not
blue jeans, basically, because again, you look like you're edging
(32:49):
really close to Canadian tuxedo. Yeah, but you know I've
seen people pull it off. Will Ferrell he worked Innadian tuxedo.
He's hilarious. He got up there, do you see that
jean getting blue jeans? But he offset it. Yeah, I
was like, because he did that whole Neil Diamond thing. Remember, no, oh,
(33:11):
one of his greatest characters from Sorrence Live is Neil
Diamond and you sorry, I mean Robert Goulay. Do you know? Okay,
this Neil Diamond makes his Robert Goulay look like like
dog poop. Really, it's yes. I don't think I ever
saw there was he did it multiple times, but there
was one where he did. A VH one storyteller is
(33:32):
Neil Diamond and like Neil Diamonds just off the rails
on like on pills and like he's got stitches for
some reason, they come loose and just beautiful. He's like
a bigoted racist who's singing about he can't really stand
as keyboard player because he's black, and his keyboard players like,
what are you talking? Yeah? It is Tim Meadows. So
(33:55):
I I I demand that everybody pressed Paul and go
watch the Neil Diamond Forever or no vh win storytellers
will Ferrell and we'll wait. I will check that out
and we're back. Okay, So where the heck are we now?
Is the environmental nightmare that is modern text, not just
(34:16):
blue jeans but textile dying period. Uh. There's a documentary
called River Blue that I have not seen yet. Sounds lovely,
but it details the chemical manufacturing process for denim specifically
where like you go to China and there are rivers
that are running blue um, which is not good for
many reasons. No, some of the reasons are that the
(34:38):
die itself makes the river blue, which blocks out sunlight.
So plants die everything. Yeah, when they when they disintegrate,
they are broken down by bacteria which stuck up all
the oxygen, which kills the fish. It's just a horrible
chain reaction. Um. Again, remember even with synthetic indigo, but
(34:59):
with natural as well. Even with synthetic indigo, that the
dye doesn't want to stick to the stuff. So you
have to use something called the mordant, which is a
bleaching agent that actually that will bind the indigo die
to the garment. Oh, I thought the mordant was because
the initial color that it gets is not the blue
that you want, so you have to keep bleaching it.
(35:19):
That's not my understanding, you know. I think it's the
thing that binds that says, hey, indigo, come on over
here and let's hang out with this this denim and
we'll stain it blue. Well, the wastewater the leftover mordants
are terrible or either acidic or their chromium or some
other kind of horrible metal that kills fish and poisons
(35:40):
the supply. Yeah, you know they spell it differently, which
is why they pronounce it differently. No, I looked it up.
How's it spelled exactly as it's pronounced. But we spell
it aluminum in the US and in Canada. Apparently the
rest of the English king world spells it alumni. Yum,
(36:02):
there's that extra syllable spelled out. Oh they say aluminium. Yeah, okay,
I didn't know that. I thought it was just aluminium, right,
but they're they're really saying aluminium, but they're just they're British,
so that would be an extra I after the end.
Aluminum aluminium, Yes, exactly, all right, But in't that fascinating
(36:24):
we spell it differently. Yeah, that's weird, But anyway, you
don't want that stuff in your water supply. And it
comes about in aces from the four billion pairs of
genes that are died every year in the world. Yeah,
jeans and geen jackets and gene hats all Canadian tuxedos.
(36:44):
That's right, But they are trying to work on this. UM.
There's a more environmentally friendly way they're there trying to
formulate UM. I did not understand this at all, So
I'm just gonna say it's magic through chemistry. I have
a feeling you're gonna want to explain it. Well, So
it's here's the thing. Do you remember, Like endoxyl is
(37:07):
what you're after when you're when you're extracting and fermenting
indigo or indigo ferra plants in indigo. So that indoxyl
it's super unstable, so it likes to buy into something.
It becomes something else. We can't use that something else.
You need the endoxyle. What they figured out is too
they genetically altered an E. Coli, a strain of E. Coli,
(37:29):
and it secretes that that precursor to endoxyl, or they
can make it secrete it right right, Yeah, they like
genetically engineered to do so UM that that precursor to endoxyl.
When you put it together UM with some other natural enzyme,
it separates that precursor into endoxyl and glucose, and then
(37:52):
all of a sudden you've got endoxyl. And what's neat
is they found that with this particular type of endoxyl,
when you expose it to air, it automatically turns into indigo. Well,
it turns into uh luke luco indigo, which is the
white indigo, which apparently is what you actually want to
make things blue. That's right, it's really confusing it. You
(38:13):
just lost me with that one. That's the deal. But
they're they're they're saying, like, we've got this thing. It's like,
this system actually works. We've engineered this bacteria to produce
basically the precursor to indigo, and then you scale it.
That's always the problem, exactly. It's exactly because big Denim
is gonna say, great, show me the numbers. Tommy Hill
(38:34):
figure is going to be like, I can't make any
money off this, and and so will an tom antoine
bugle boy. Well, they won't have anything to do with
it unless it's cost efficient. Oh that's good. Uh. And
the good thing about this is is it it uh
solves a couple of problems. Um, the chemical synthesis of
(38:55):
indigo is just bad. And then you also don't need
that mortan bleaching stage either, and all of this stuff
is running off into the rivers in China and other places.
But if you don't have that, and you just have
this nice little bacteria producing it on a massive scale,
then the denim producers will say we're on board and
the world will be saved. It's just could there be
(39:17):
anything more wrong with the world? I know, because you
start to think about like someone like someone who's vegan,
it's like really walking the walk and trying to do
the right thing, and like, I don't wear leather, no belts,
no shoes, all of this stuff. They say, maybe while
wearing their jeans or maybe not. Maybe they're like, oh,
(39:40):
and I don't. I won't wear denim either. But I
think it's all dependent on what you have researched. You
could probably research everything on your body and find some
awful practice along the way. Unless you're just sitting on
your commune making your clothes and weaving your loom and
you're just wearing like Tan Lennon's no colors, no dies.
(40:04):
You're like, because you're not gonna smash up a beetle
to get green. No, because that's not environmentally friendly either.
Beetles got a right to live. Yeah, beatles got a beetle.
You got anything else? No, it's just sad. You're right,
and I was hoping to end it on the upbeat thing,
but not this one. Yeah. You you follow the chain
of almost anything used today, and it's got some terrible thing.
(40:26):
I've got. I've got it. But that doesn't mean you
should give up. No, no, because anyway, any choice you
make that helps something continue to live did not be polluted.
It's still helping. Now you're still screwing up this other
way you don't mean to, but the other stuff that
you are doing that is helping is still helping. It
(40:46):
still saving a life, it's still promoting some healthier ecosystem somewhere,
and it's still worthwhile. I'm a big subscriber to this.
You know, you don't have to be all or nothing.
Some people are that's great, But every little bit of
good you can do is still doing good because I've
been taking the task personally over the years from listeners saying,
how can you be an advocate for dogs and eat meat? Oh? Yeah,
(41:08):
they love that one, And I'm like, you know, I'm
still helping dogs. You know, I just really love two
ounces of perfectly proportioned beef jerky was and maybe I
should be vegan. But to call me out on saying,
you know, you're a hypocrite because you're helping dogs, like, no,
helping dogs is good, period, full stop. Agreed, And they're like,
(41:29):
you know, strangling turtles with a plastic bag while they're
saying this too, because I guarantee if you drilled in chuck,
you could find something too. Yeah. Yeah, but that's not
a fruitful road to go down. No it's not chuck, No,
it's not agreed. Uh. Well, if you want to know
more about being a better person, go back and listen
to our catalog. How about that? Yeah? All of them? Um,
(41:51):
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
what is this? Oh? This is kind of a fun one.
It's a correction for you, but it's a lighthearted and
fun one. Hey, you guys, A long time listener, huge
advocate for all you do. I live in southern Maine
and frequently make the long drives to Vermont. In your
podcast helps me make that more tolerable. But I got
(42:13):
a bone to pick with Josh. Whenever the state of
Maine comes up, you guys always slide in a comment
about our state's weird and independent nature. Rightly so. But
I've now counted two times at least where Josh is
misidentified Maine as the slogan live for or Die uh,
the first time in the rank choice voting and then
more recently in AI facial recognition. I let it go then,
(42:34):
but I have to say something now, Live for you
or Die is famously New Hampshire state motto Josh, not Maine.
It's even on their license plate. Main state motto is uh,
dear a dear Ago dear a Joe Latin for eye lead.
I have no idea d I R I G O.
That suits us quite well as our state leads as
the first in the nation to use rank choice voting,
(42:57):
having the most breweries per capita, and being the state
in which the most Stephen King books take place. Again,
I love the show. Always chuckle when you call us
Maynard's weirdos. I hope you enjoyed your time in Portland
during your live episode last Wall. Now, if you excuse me,
I have to go ride my moose to the ocean
so I can catch lobsters by my lighthouse. And that
is from John Q Neo. Speaking of lighthouses, we both agreed.
(43:21):
The Lighthouse was an amazing movie. I know you just
randomly texted me, it's just so good that have you
seen The Lighthouse. I was moved to Robert Agars, just
please keep making movies. He's great, and I was. I
wish it hadn't gotten shut out of the Academy Awards.
I thought, why would it have been because it was
black and white, because it was weird, It was almost
an experimental film. But the fact that either or both
(43:43):
of them did not get nominated for Best Actor is
just ridiculous, pretty ridiculous because they were both amazing and
production design everything. Have you ever seen a more like
authentic looking film that's absolutely true Edgar's Robert Pattinson came
out and was like, we basically lived like you know,
it was whatever year it was. He was like, it
(44:05):
was awful. It's like all the stuff you see is
doing is the wheelbarrow scene that just looks miserable because
it was. Yeah, everybody, if you don't know we're talking about,
just go look up the Lighthouse and it was so
good and watch it and just watch it all the
way through. Okay, and then after that I really like this,
then go watch the Witch, which is Robert Eger's first movie.
(44:26):
That's right, his first movie was The Witch, one of
the greatest films ever made. In Pattinson is just one
of my favorite actors. He's so great. Have you seen
Good Time? Oh? Yeah, man, I couldn't believe how good
that was. Amazing. Okay, John wrote that that listener mailan
right hold on, I think it was John, Yes, John, Cuneo. John,
I can tell you that definitely in the facial recognition episode,
(44:50):
I was being I was trolling. I know for a
fact that it's New Hampshire's slogan, and if I know Josh, John,
you're going to hear that again. Yeah. I would also
guess that when I said it before in whatever other
episode I said it any Yeah, I don't remember that.
That was probably me trolling too, But if I was mistaken,
I apologize live for or die everyone. If you want
(45:10):
to get in touch with us, like John did, you
can go into Stuff you Should Know dot com, or
you can just send us an email to stuff podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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