Now I Know More (4 page)

The state provided him with this meal, costing hundreds of dollars and consisting of thousands of calories. Brewer, claiming he was not very hungry, ate exactly none of it.

The next day, state legislators asked the Department of Criminal Justice to end the tradition of “last meals.” One lawmaker stated, “It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It's a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim.” The Department of Criminal Justice chairperson agreed, and the tradition ended. Since then, per the
Houston Chronicle
, “Last meals will consist of whatever is on the menu for all prisoners”—with no special adjustments for those about to be executed.

In the 1960s, a Swiss psychotherapist named Max Lüscher developed what is now known as the Lüscher color test, a system to help describe someone's personality. Dr. Lüscher would give the person eight cards, each of a different color—blue, yellow, red, green, violet, brown, grey, and black—and ask the subject to put them in order from most preferred to least preferred. Figuring that our taste in colors was something created by our subconscious selves, Dr. Lüscher further surmised that people of similar personality types would rank colors similarly.

The Lüscher color test is not often used anymore, since its validity has been widely questioned and its results do not match up well with better-received personality tests. However, Dr. Lüscher's work ushered in other research into the role color plays in our psyches.

Which is why it may be a good idea to paint prison cells pink.

In the 1970s, Alexander Schauss, a scientist in Tacoma, Washington, began exploring whether seeing a certain color could cause our emotional states to change. After a series of tests, he concluded that a certain shade of pink—#FF91AF if you're a web developer, CMYK 0-43-41-0 if print is more your thing—has a calming effect, taking the edge off of those who are overly aggressive. Specifically, Schauss noted that this shade of pink caused a measurable physiological reaction; there was “a marked effect on lowering the heart rate, pulse, and respiration as compared to other colors.”

In early 1979 a local naval prison put Schauss's finding into action. The experiment was a simple one. The naval officers painted the walls of an 18' x 24' cell a bubblegum-like, Pepto Bismol–ish shade of pink recommended by Schauss. Some inmates were confined in the cell for a short time, as inmates would typically be in any prison cell. According to the follow-up report, the experiment worked: not only were there “no incidents of erratic or hostile behavior during the initial phase of confinement,” but the navy reported that even fifteen minutes of exposure to the pink-walled room resulted in a noticeable reduction in aggressive behavior after release from the cell. Schauss, as reported by
USA Today
, claimed that before the introduction of the pink cell, the naval correctional center averaged one assault on staff per day. After? Only one such assault over the next six months.

Schauss named the color Baker-Miller Pink, after the directors of the naval correctional institute who agreed to test his theory. Others have called it “Drunk Tank Pink” after the colloquial name for small jail cells, and it's not uncommon to see jails and prisons with pink walls for these purposes. But one other place has given it a different name—and a different use. If you go to the University of Iowa's Kinnick Stadium, you'll find the walls, lockers, and even the urinals of the visiting football team's locker room painted Baker-Miller Pink, an explicit attempt to make the opposing team less aggressive when they take to the football field.

Roy G. Biv.

That's not a person. It's a mnemonic device for remembering the colors in the visible spectrum of light, or in another sense, the colors of rainbows. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. In between each of these colors is almost every other color we can detect . . . “almost” being the operative word.

The exception? Magenta. Go find a picture of a rainbow and you'll notice that magenta (often called pink), just isn't there. But, color-blindness aside, we can clearly see it. What's going on here?

First, let's talk about rainbows. Light comes in all sorts of wavelengths, and we humans can detect light in many of those wavelengths. (We can't see all of them—infrared and ultraviolet are two of the more commonly known invisible ones, but radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays are also examples.) The light itself doesn't actually have a color—as Isaac Newton observed, “The rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.” Our brains just associate different wavelengths with different colors. The range of 380 nanometers to about 450 nanometers are seen as various shades of violet, for example. Magenta, though, doesn't have an associated wavelength.

Instead, our brain just kind of makes it up when other information comes in.

Our eyes have photoreceptor cells called rods and cones. Rods detect the presence and amount of light, even if there are only small amounts, but cannot help us determine the color of things. Cones, which require more light before they turn on, help us figure out the colors. (That's why when it's dark, we often can't tell what color things are.) Humans typically have three types of cones: red, blue, and green. Everything the cones detect, therefore, is actually just one of those three colors, and our brains fill in the gaps so we can “see” the other colors of the rainbow. When a yellow wavelength comes in, for example, the red and green cones are triggered. Our brains interpret that as “yellow,” and bananas, school buses, and lemons are better off for it. This makes sense . . . just ask Roy G. Biv. If you look between red and green, you'll see yellow is situated right in there.

Magenta occurs when the red and blue cones are stimulated. That's a problem if you look at the rainbow, because there's no “between” red and blue, as the ends of the spectrum don't connect with each other. The brain needs to do something with that information, and magenta seems like a pretty good solution, although for no obvious reason. After all, as
Scientific American
said (echoing Newton's observation), color “is all in your head [. . .]. It is a sensation that arises in your brain.” If we're going to make up the colors anyway, there's no reason to limit ourselves to the stuff found in the visible spectrum—and the result is pink.

In 1903, the husband and wife team of Edwin and Alice Binney created the first wax crayon. Mr. Binney and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, owned a colorant company called the Binney and Smith Company, which, on July 10 of that year, introduced the couple's new product—Crayola crayons. In the century-plus since, the company (now officially the Crayola company) has introduced more than 400 different colors of crayons, of which 133 are considered “standard” colors available in their pack of 120. (Crayola has retired thirteen colors over the years, including Blue Gray in 1990 and Thistle in 2000.) In recent years, Crayola produces 3 billion crayons each year, and over its history it has produced well over 100 billion crayons.

Emerson Moser was one of the people responsible for many of those crayons. He was a Crayola employee working as a crayon molder—a person who pours the molten wax into the molds, shaping it into the recognizable (and useful) crayon shapes as it dries. For more than thirty years, day in and day out, Moser made crayons. Roughly 100 times a day, he'd pour wax into molds designed for 2,400 crayons. Over the course of his career, he molded an estimated 1.4 billion crayons. Periwinkle or Peach, Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber, it didn't matter the color.

That last part—that the color didn't matter—that's pretty important. Because when he retired, Emerson Moser admitted he was colorblind.

The infirmity was, of course, something you'd normally not want from a man whose job it was to make one of ten dozen different colors. However, Moser's colorblindness, he'd later explain to the Associated Press, was slight; his biggest problem was determining the difference between similar shades of blues and greens. (That's probably not all that strange—can many of us really tell the difference between Aquamarine and Turquoise Blue, or between Jungle Green and Fern, for example?) He told reporters that he found out he was colorblind in 1953, when a doctor discovered the issue during a routine physical exam, but “it was so slight that if the doctor wouldn't have tested me, I probably would have never noticed it.”

His job didn't involve making sure that the right labels were on the right crayons, anyway—the crayons, after hardening in the molds, went to another area for that part of the manufacturing process. That being the case, the company was okay with the odd little fact that their most senior crayon molder wasn't able to differentiate between all 120 colors. Besides, Moser was a top employee: as of his retirement in 1990, Moser's record of 1.4 billion crayons molded stood above anyone else in the company.