Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1901 — QUEER USES OF INDIGO. [ARTICLE]

QUEER USES OF INDIGO.

Its Relation to Lyddite Sheila, Which Tarn Things Yellow. “Naturally, the next thing to consider should be indigo, because speaking of ‘water’ and ‘clean* makes you think of washing and Monday morning and the blue-bag. Also, it makes you think of the Boers by indirection, for those defenders of their institutions make one wet rag in the morning do duty for the faces and hands of pap and mother and the eleven children; and then, too, the British fired shells of lyddite at them, and the fumes of the explosion turned them a gaudy yellow in complexion. Now, lyddite Is indigo on which nitric acid has been poured. It is not only a thing to be melted and loaded into shells and set off with a primer of guncotton, but it is a brilliant yellow dye. When the explosive is made In England It is called lyddite; when it Is made In France it is called melinite, but It will answer to either name It it Is touched off In the right way. “This may seem a queer use of indigo, but it is still queerer that all the bright colors that we call the aniline dyes, and which we know are derived from the coal tar products, are so named from indigo’s other name, ‘anil,’ made In the laboratory. So many and so wonderful are the uses to which chemists have put the common, black, ill-smelling tar, that byproduct which the early manufacturers of Illuminating gas tried so piteously to get carted away, that one hardly dares to speaks of them as queer. They are too great. They are amazing. They are even awe-inspir-ing, for to see whither experimentation with the carbon compounds has brought us is to realize that there we are very near to the spot where the profoundest secrets of the living, growing world, lie hid. Some of the triumphs of the chemist in his domain come so near to mortal man’s having a hand in creation itself that it almost scares. When a human being can make from tar an indigo so good and so cheap that within the last four years it has risen to be the successful rival of the indigo that the Good Lord causes to grow in plants, we may well pause and look back upon the long and tortuous way we have come since first our ancestors began to make queer uses of common things.”— Harvey Sutherland, In Ainslee’s.