2900 BCE: The earliest known samples of a synthetic blue pigment we now call blue frit are used in a tomb painting in Egypt. The hue was made by heating quartz, lime, a copper compound and an alkali, and binding the mix with a natural gum or egg.
2500 BCE: The Ancient Egyptians use blue extensively in murals, sculpture and ritual objects. Lapis lazuli produced a deep rich blue, a glass compound was used for a paler blue, and a cobalt-silica mix yielded a black-blue.
2400 BCE: Traces of indigo dye from this period have shown up in artefacts from the Indus Valley Civilisation. The dye was probably used on fabrics.
1215 CE: Blue-and-white porcelain, using cobalt from Iran, is prized by the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty. The later period, Ming, is what gave these distinctive ceramics their name.
1300s: Lapis lazuli from a mine in present-day Afghanistan makes its way via the Silk Roads to Europe. The ultramarine pigment it produced is so expensive and striking, artists use it primarily to depict the divine.
1459: Rao Jodha builds Jodhpur’s Mehrangarh Fort. It overlooks a city with distinctive cobalt-blue walls, which may have indicated upper-caste homes or pest-control for termites. It’s still known as the Blue City.
1706: Finally, a modern synthetic blue. German Prussian Blue — dark, strong, stable — makes its way into Japanese woodcuts, Kalighat watercolours, fabrics and, by 1889, Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
1748: Officers of the British Royal Navy are required to wear a very dark blue as part of their uniform. People start calling it navy blue. It is later adopted for men’s suits, to impart the same sense of trust and authority.
1824: A French chemist devises a formula to mimic ultramarine. French Ultramarine Blue looks rich, but is cheap. The art world and commercial world pounce on it.
1859: Indigo farmers in Bengal, protesting poor working conditions and generations of debt, lead an uprising against the British. The Indigo Commission investigating the mutiny observes that, “not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood”.
1860s: A new music genre emerges from America’s Deep South, stemming from African-American songs of work and worship. They genre is called the Blues, from “blue devils”, a term for melancholy and sadness.
1873: Blue jeans are born when Bavarian entrepreneur Levi Strauss and Latvian tailor Jacob Davis jointly create indigo-washed dungarees with steel rivets at the seams. Gold-rush miners love their strength and comfort. Strauss makes them in brown too. Buyers prefer blue.
1917: Mahatma Gandhi leads his first satyagraha from Champaran, Bihar, in solidarity with its oppressed indigo plantation workers.
1924: An American newspaper makes the first recorded reference to “blue collar” workers, referring to the colour of the canvas or cotton shirts and boiler suits worn by manual labourers.
1930s: Phthalocyanine pigments, a class of chemicals that respond well to light, heat, acid, alkali and solvents, are developed. These, along with quinacridones from the ’50s, are the colourants in today’s paints, inks and the dyes in plastics and textiles.
1947: The Indian flag is unfurled in a newly independent nation. Blue is the fourth colour, a navy hue for the Ashoka Chakra.
1956: Elvis Presley releases Blue Suede Shoes as the opening track on his eponymous debut album. The song, recorded by Carl Perkins the previous year, refers to army shoes. Elvis’s version is by far the bigger hit.
1966: Bombay chemist Keki Gharda works out a way to locally manufacture German Blue, an expensive dye used on school uniforms, in a better quality at a fraction of the cost, reducing import pressures.
1968: Earthrise, a colour photo of Earth taken from the Moon during the Apollo 8 mission, captures the human imagination. Our world is round, small, vulnerable and so blue. The image galvanises the environmental movement.
1971: David Bowie turns blue eyeshadow into an instant fashion classic with the video for the song Life on Mars.
1984: Blue error screens debut on Windows computers. Their most famous avatar, Microsoft’s dreaded Blue Screen of Death, was introduced with Windows 3.0.
1985: India’s cricket team gives up the white jersey for a light blue kit with a yellow stripe, for that year’s world championship. By 1998, the jersey is all-blue.
1987: Sridevi shows Bollywood how sexy a plain blue sari can be, in the Mr India song Kaatey Nahi Katte.
1998: Jewellers Tiffany & Co trademark a shade of robin’s-egg blue, a colour they have been using for their luxury-item catalogue since 1845.
2006: Meryl Streep, as fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, succinctly explains how luxury trends trickle down to the public, using her assistant’s cheap cerulean blue sweater as an example. “That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs,” she says.
2009: Indian-origin chemist Mas Subramanian creates the first new blue pigment in over two centuries, at Oregon State University.
2014: WhatsApp’s infamous blue ticks are introduced, showing senders if their messages have been delivered and viewed.
2019: The Hong Kong police add indelible blue dye to their water cannons, staining masked protestors and making them easier to identify later. The move sparks global outrage.
2021: VS Gaitonde’s untitled oil on canvas from 1961 sells for ₹39.98 crore, setting a new global record for highest price fetched by an Indian art work at auction. The abstract work uses shades of blue prominently.
2021: Dutch paints conglomerate AkzoNobel announces that it is running out of ingredients to make some shades of blue, after global supply-chain disruptions caused by the pandemic. Buyers have braced for higher costs and delivery delays that are expected to last until the middle of next year.
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