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Have you ever noticed that there is very little blue in nature?
Except for the sky and the sea (that is physical refraction), it is difficult to find blue animals and blue rocks.

Before the 18th century, if a painter wanted to paint blue, he had to go to Afghanistan to dig up a gem called "lapis lazuli" and grind it into powder. This thing is called "ultramarine" and its price is several times that of gold.
Therefore, in the paintings at that time, only the Virgin Mary’s robe dared to use blue. Poor painters can't afford it.

Until 1704, an alchemist in Berlin accidentally created a "color revolution" in a pot of medicinal soup mixed with insect corpses and cow blood.


1. Frankenstein’s “Ox Blood Soup”

The protagonist of the story is Konrad Dippel.
This man was a freak, and it is said that Mary Shelley was based on him when she wrote Frankenstein. He spent all day tinkering with corpses in the castle, trying to make the elixir of immortality.

One day, he cooperated with another paint dealer and wanted to make red paint (carmine).
The original recipe called for plant ash, but in order to save money, Dippel poured the leftover scraps from the previous "bone oil" refining (mixed with cow blood and animal offal) into the pot.

This time, a miracle happened.
No red color appeared in the pot, but a deep, brooding, and breathtaking blue crystal precipitated.

This is the first artificially synthesized blue pigment in human history - Prussian Blue.

It's so cheap and extremely pigmented.
Overnight, blue changed from a "royal special" to a "street stall product."
Without this accident, we might not be able to see Katsushika Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (the famous Japanese wave painting) today, because the reason why that painting could be printed in so many copies was because of the cheap Prussian blue imported from Europe to Japan.

2. Take apart "beauty", the god of death lives inside

Painters reveled for half a century before chemists realized: What exactly is this thing made of?

In 1782, Swedish chemist Scheele heated Prussian blue and acid together.
He originally wanted to study the properties of pigments, but isolated a colorless gas.
The gas has a light, pleasant bitter almond smell.

Scheler named it Prussian acid.
Now, we call it - hydrocyanic acid.

Yes, that's Cyanide.
The poison king who appears most frequently in Conan and scares countless people.

Who would have thought? The chemical essence of the beautiful pigment that depicts melancholic starry skies and turbulent waves on canvas is actually ferrocyanide.
As long as its chemical structure remains intact, it is a non-toxic pigment.
But if you use strong acid to destroy it and release the "cyano" (CN) inside, it becomes an invisible blade that kills people.

Art and death are actually the same thing at the molecular level.

3. Nazi Gas Chambers: Revenge of Color

Remember the "air-grabbing bread" Harper we talked about before?
The main component of Zyklon B he invented is hydrocyanic acid.

In the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, the Nazis used this gas to murder millions of Jews.
Later, when the gas chambers were being cleaned, some strange blue spots were discovered on the walls.

This confused the Allies at the time: Why did the wall turn blue?
Later, tests revealed that this was because the cyanide in the poison gas had penetrated into the bricks in the wall all year round and reacted with the iron ions in the bricks.
It changed back to Prussian Blue.

Here are the creepiest chemical reactions in history:
The poison gas originally used to kill people has turned back into beautiful paint on the wall.
Those blue stains are the last marks left by millions of innocent souls, and are called "the blue of Auschwitz."

4. The spy’s last line of defense

By the Cold War, cyanide became a standard ingredient in spy films.

KGB and CIA agents would hide a potassium cyanide capsule in their collar or dentures.
Once captured, agents would chew the capsules to avoid leaking information.

The principle is very simple and crude:
After cyanide ions enter the blood, they will tightly cling to the "cytochrome oxidase" in the cells.
This enzyme is responsible for supplying oxygen to cells. Once locked, the cells in your body become "suffocated".
Note that you can still breathe and there is oxygen in your blood, but your cells can’t get enough oxygen.

This is an extremely painful "internal suffocation".
The whole process only takes a few seconds. The brain shut down instantly and the heart stopped beating.
This is the fastest and most decisive way of self-destruction that humans can invent.

5. Big plot twist: It’s actually the antidote?

At this point in the story, Prussian Blue seems to be a hidden evil.
But in medicine, it has an incredible identity: antidote.

If you accidentally drink Thallium (a highly toxic heavy metal that was used for poisoning in the past), or suffer from Cesium-137 nuclear radiation contamination.
The drug your doctor prescribed to you is none other than Industrial Grade Prussian Blue.
Let you swallow the paint directly.

Why is this?
Because the crystal structure of Prussian blue is very special, like a cage.
This cage is just big enough to contain thallium ions and cesium ions. And the cage is so strong that stomach acid cannot dissolve it.

Therefore, the Prussian blue you eat will act like a vacuum cleaner, sucking heavy metals into a cage in your intestines, and then excrete them through the intestines.
(The side effect is that your daddy will turn dark blue, and the picture is too beautiful to look at).

A pigment with cyanide hidden in the body is actually the savior of heavy metal poisoning.
This is the dark humor of chemistry.


Conclusion

Next time you go to an art museum and see Van Gogh's famous "Starry Night" or Monet's water lilies, please take another look at that deep blue.

That's not just the color.
It was the alchemist's oxblood soup, the ghosts on the walls of Auschwitz, the despair when the spy bit into the capsule, and the last hope for nuclear radiation patients.

Prussian Blue. It is the face of an angel, the heart of the devil, and, the means of the Savior.