The colorful history of paint throughout the centuries demonstrates the quest by humans to bring just a bit of color and beauty into lives that, at certain points, had to be fairly brutish and somewhat nasty at times. Efforts at creation of paint can be seen in ancient cave drawings in France that have been dated back to nearly 20, 000 or more years.
Many people may not know it, but it was the ancient Chinese of thousands of years back who were the first people to develop a system for processing and making of very nice paint. Ancient Egyptian civilization -- fascinated as it was by pictorial representations and paint needed to show them -- also spent a great deal of time in the creation of paint. The Greeks -- some 3500 years ago -- also improved paint making.
It seems as if everything the Greeks developed or worked on came also to be developed or worked on by the Romans. They developed a number of fascinating processes for the making of all different kinds of paint, as a matter of fact. The years between 600 BCE and 400 AD also saw the invention of varnish, which is still used in many paints. All around the world, it seems, the development of paint was occurring.
Aztec Indians were no slackers when it came to creating dyes and pigments, and red dye was valued even more than gold by this civilization. The Greek scholar and philosopher Plato was the first person to discover that you could make us to completely different colors together to produce yet a third different color. At that time, this was not known.
The various materials, pigments, dyes and other constituents of paint throughout the centuries is also a story unto itself. The Romans were the first to invent purple, which quickly came to be associated with royalty, which it is even to this day. To create a pound of the particles needed to make it, the shells of 4 million mollusks had to be crushed. Dried ink sac from a squid was originally used to make brown.
The Spaniards, borrowing paint making skills from the Aztecs, introduced crimson or red to Europe in the 1500s. To make it required the carapaces of nearly 1, 000, 000 female beetles of the cochineal species in order to create just the right deepness of color. Paints that were in use before the 19th century all needed some sort of oil to keep the particles and constituents bound up.
Working hard to perfect the oil base in paints, the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company -- in 1880 -- perfected a process using linseed oil that resulted in the complete intermingling and binding together of the many products required to create a color. Today, this basic formula is still used in the general process for making most oil based paints, which says quite a bit about the skill of researchers at that paint company.
The colorful history of paint throughout the centuries demonstrates yet again how resourceful and clever humans can be, especially when they are working to bring just a bit of diversion and, literally, color into their own lives. Efforts in interjecting such color can be seen in ancient cave drawings from 20, 000 years ago, along with the various materials used to make paint over the centuries.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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