Quantum Blue
Blue may be humanity’s favorite color, but you won’t find it in any cave paintings. Blue pigments are exceedingly rare in nature, and early man didn’t know how to make it.
It wasn’t until around 3000 BC that Egyptians would devise the first blue paint, made from a baked slurry of sand, limestone, copper fragments, and other ingredients. It was popular stuff, used to imitate the color of semi-precious stones like turquoise and evoke the realm of the gods. Halfway across the globe, the Mayans created a blue paint from the indigo plant fused with a mineral clay. Like in Egypt, the color had special significance, and it was mostly reserved for ceremonial use, adorning temples, altars, and even the bodies of those to be sacrificed. In Renaissance Europe, painters went wild for a vivid paint called “ultramarine,” made from crushed lapis lazuli and so-named because it was imported from “beyond the sea.” Dutch master Johannes Vermeer loved it so much he drove his family to financial ruin due, in part, to his heavy use of the pricey pigment.
In 2019, thanks to the wizards at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, a new bluer blue debuted, this one based on quantum physics. Called quantum blue, the phosphorescent pigment is made from quantum dots, which its creators describe as inorganic nanocrystals made from semiconductors. We’ll have to take their word for it.
State Gem
In 1907, failed melon farmer Jim Couch set out on a prospecting mission into the southern Diablo Range, the dry, scrubby mountains dividing California’s San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys. For three days, Couch and a partner plodded on horseback through the forbidding landscape with nothing to show for it. On the fourth day, however, Couch came upon a small tributary of the San Benito River and was astounded by what he saw. The river bed glimmered as if lined with shards of broken glass. A closer look revealed thousands of tiny blue gemstones that seemed to have weathered out of the adjacent hillside. “Sapphires!” he thought.
But they weren’t. After passing under the loupes of several perplexed jewelers, Couch’s specimens wound up in the lab of Berkeley geologist George Louderback, who realized he was holding a new discovery. The glittering blue crystals were softer than the most sought-after gems, but had a refractive index (aka sparkle) to rival them. Louderback named the novel gemstone benitoite for the river and county in which it was found.
Today, benitoite remains one of the rarest of all gemstones, with larger specimens selling for tens of thousands of dollars. In 1985, it was designated California’s state gemstone.
Card Stunts
During the Big Game of 1910, Stanford fans were treated to a mind-boggling sight: a massive image materialized from the packed Cal grandstand. It was unmistakably the Stanford Axe, their own symbol of might and victory turned against them. In a carefully orchestrated, never-before-seen exploit, Cal fans had created the image by strategically donning or removing their colored “rooters’ caps.”
In one fundamental respect, the 1910 Big Game was different from what you might imagine: It was not football. Starting in 1906, football had been abolished at Cal and Stanford due to excessive violence, and it was replaced by what UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler called “the heartiest and manliest of the Anglo-Saxon sports,” rugby.
But one thing hadn’t changed. The rivalry of Big Game played out as much among the fans in the grandstands as it did between the players on the field. Each year brought an opportunity for the rabid Cal and Stanford faithful to one-up each other with novel chants, banners, and other boisterous gimmicks. This time the Cal fans had outdone themselves.
In 1914, the final year of the rugby experiment, Cal fans swapped the hat trick for choreographed card stunts. Using colored cards, Bears fans realized they could create crisper, more colorful, and more varied images. Card stunts have since been emulated by sports fans around the globe.
The Mouse
It would become known as the Mother of All Demos. In 1968, a soft-spoken electrical engineer, Douglas Engelbart, M.S. ’53, Ph.D. ’55, stood before an audience of 2,000 technology enthusiasts and engineers at an annual conference in San Francisco. He asked, “If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with … a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?”
Engelbart knew the answer: a lot.
Back then, computers were decidedly user-hostile. They took up entire rooms, most lacked interactive screens, and communicating with them often meant laboriously entering instructions via punch cards or encoded paper tape. Only specialized professionals could operate them.
Engelbart foresaw a future where workers of all kinds worked in a close, even symbiotic relationship with user-friendly computers. In his famous demo, he wowed his audience with a series of groundbreaking technologies developed by his lab, the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute. These included word processing, hyperlinks, real-time remote collaboration, and even video conferencing.
He also demonstrated one of his own personal inventions: the computer mouse. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” he said. “Sometimes I apologize. It started that way, and we never did change it.”
