“Then one day a graduate student who is working in the project was taking samples out of a very hot furnace while I was walking by, and it was blue, a very beautiful blue,” he said. “I realized immediately that something amazing had happened.”
What had happened, the researchers said, was that at about 1,200 degrees centigrade – almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit – this otherwise innocuous manganese oxide turned into a vivid blue compound...
At Oregon State University, the accidental production of a brilliant blue that, with its chemical composition, has a number of advantages over other kinds of blue compounds.
Now there'll be more beautiful lasting blue in the world.
Also reminds me of the Robert Frost poem, where in the first stanza he asks:
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
And gives an answer in the second stanza.
