While entertaining my five-year-old sister I came across a crayon whose color I had never really noticed, Midnight Blue. As I admired its hue my sister curiously asked "is it called midnight blue because they make it at midnight?" At that moment that I realized that in today's day and age we go about our lives without really questioning the reality we live in. we accept these so called "facts" as the only truth, never stopping to question why something is or how it got to be what it is. The very essence of the objects and colors we see on a regular basis becomes lost within our daily routines. When you open a door, do you ever stop to and wonder who invented the hinge? When you inhale a whiff of spoiled milk does it cross your mind that a chemical reaction has occurred causing that unappealing scent? When you log on Facebook do you ask yourself when that hue of blue on the banner was found? Was it found at all? Or was it created? I was amazed at all the answers I came across when I stopped to ask exactly these questions about the color Midnight Blue.
             In attempts to answer my sisters innocent question I came to find that Midnight Blue is in fact just the name Crayola used to substitute the colors real name, Prussian blue, due to its lack of recognition among the majority of the population. Prussian blue, or Fe(CN)18(H2O)x, is also knows as Berlin Blue. This beautiful dark blue pigment was actually discovered by an 18th century chemist color maker named Heirnrich Diesbach in Dippel's Laboratory in Berlin, hence the name Berlin Blue. In Diesbach's attempts at creating a red pigment called Florentine Lake he accidentally produced "the first purely synthetic pigment" (as said by Alexander Kraft in "On the discovery and history of Prussian blue".) known to us a Prussian blue. Before the accidental chemical creation of the synthetic Prussian blue there was no readily available hue of blue. As Joshua Coh...