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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
- theodorethomas 7mo agoApollo Command Module interior colour is similar, and gorgeous.
- d--b 7mo agoHa, I am very proud that I made that discovery independently as well. In the Light vs Dark theme, I settled on a light greyish green that is somewhat close to the one described here. It really does reduce eye fatigue.
- ortusdux 7mo agoReminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
- dylan604 7mo agoGo Away reads to me as a command to the viewer to go away rather than the intended "we want the object to go away from the viewer's thoughts". If they were okay with a phrase like Go Away Green, why not something like Hidden View Green, Irrelevant Green, Don't Look Here Green, etc. Some PR department would have a field day
- vscode-rest 7mo agoProb because Go Away Green sounds way cooler than all of those and it’s not a user facing term anyways.
- deruta 7mo agoAnd alliteration for extra cool.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago"Move Along Green"
- ortusdux 7mo agoA gas station near me painted their bollards this color. I've wondered if this would be a credible legal defense for someone that accidentally backed into them.
- evanjrowley 7mo agoThe thin strip of yellow/black caution stripes on an otherwise unnoticable green conduit was so ironic it made me smile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green#/media/File:The_Haunted_Mansion_Electrical_Conduit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green#/media/File:The_... It's saying "DON'T NOTICE THIS! (also, please notice this!)"
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- jcalx 7mo agoReminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important. [0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-russian-cockpit-panels-painted-in-turquoise https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
- somat 7mo agoI wonder if the designers of cold war soviet planes read the same color theory because their cockpits are always a very particular indescribable shade of green. There were also very specific colors for subsystems, yellow for fuel, purple for hydraulics etc. Much more than the contemporary US designs.
- Loughla 7mo agoMy father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything. He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material. The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.
- saltcured 7mo agoTangentially, this reminds me of stories from my dad who got some kind of special award for having made their ship radar the best in the fleet. Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoCheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.
- eggsome 7mo agoSurely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)
- huflungdung 7mo agoHalf arsed article. Expected much more detail
- dogscatstrees 7mo agoThis article is a gem, thank you. Now off to Sherwin-Williams to see what the equivalent color names are. I wonder if there are matching formula.
- srmatto 7mo agoWould be cool to get an original copy of "Colors for Interiors: Historical and Modern by Faber Birren" and create color matches assuming it's not faded too much. I wonder if he created some kind of pigmentation ratio (or however paint coloring works) that he shared somewhere?
- 3eb7988a1663 7mo agoPlanet Money had a story about the quantization of color[0]. Prior to this, people would essentially bring in a flower, piece of pottery, etc that they wanted to color match for the particular piece at hand. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197961103/pantone-colors-lawrence-herbert-stuart-semple-standards https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197961103/pantone-colors-law...
- mgerdts 7mo agoIn the late 80s I worked in an industrial controls shop. This is the type of place that makes the cabinets with all the buttons, switches, and lights commonly associated with nuke plant controls. Only we did mostly controls for paper making machinery for Kimberly-Clark, Appleton Papers, etc. Most of our green cabinets were spotlite green. Seafoam green was rare. Both paint colors were prepared by our local sherwin Williams. The colors looked pretty much the same to me.
- mlacks 7mo agoOn US submarines, every bulkhead and beam not in the bilge is painted seafoam green. We were told it was the most soothing/ anti-rage inducing color possible - necessary for long deployments in cramped quarters. After a little over a decade of service, no other color infuriates me more
- fgonzag 7mo agoSilver lining, at least your triggered by a color that basically doesn't exist and is no longer in wide spread use. (As in you won't find it as much in daily civilian life)
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoThat’s a fascinating story! I’d never even heard of this guy.
- emmelaich 7mo agoGal.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago> Gal. Heh. That explains it. I was wondering what problem people had with the comment. I was talking about Faber Birren. The article is basically about him. Definitely a guy. It’s always a pleasure to be “corrected,” hereabouts…
- ryandrake 7mo agoIt's so nice to see colors in any kind of government, industrial, or commercial building. The "everything must be gray/beige" fad has dominated institutional interior design for at least 30 years. Maybe it's just nostalgia, I remember the wall colors in banks, schools, doctor's offices, mcdonalds, and so on in the 1970s and they seemed so wonderful. All these things got a coat of white paint sometime in the 2000s and look the same as everywhere else now.
- mikepurvis 7mo agoI feel that too. My house had significant chunks painted a vivid aquamarine when I moved in 2018, and my now-ex insisted that we paint over it all in grey. After she moved out, I put up greens, yellows, brown, and blue all over the house. It's not quite as "public pool" feeling as that original aquamarine, but it's certainly more lively than grey/white. Funny enough though, when I had a designer come in to take measurements and do a mockup for a kitchen reno... everything was back to white because that's step one in making it look "modern" even though part of the pitch is custom cabinetry that won't just look like that same white IKEA stuff that everyone installs now.
- bobomonkey 7mo agoInstall the boring shit and use colored vinal wrap for fun. Good resale value and you can enjoy life.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoIt's common for homes especially when prepped for sale because neutral colors won't clash with whatever the potential buyer might want to bring in e.g. furniture, artwork, or other decor. Most of the rooms in my house are painted in colors and I mostly like it but it can sometimeds feel fatiguing. I've thought about repainting in a neutral gray or green.
- silisili 7mo agoI get that argument, but as a counterpoint of one: Our last house we got so tired of the drabness, we used rich reds, golds, greens, and an even a bright orange in one room. It made the whole house feel so much more vibrant, it's hard to explain but it was just... pleasant to look at. Anyways, the new owners tracked down my wife over some old mail, and during the conversation they thanked us for having painted it so vividly and said it was part of why they were drawn to it. They shared pics and they've done a -ton- of work, but the paint colors remain :)
- jscheel 7mo agoI got through this entire article before I realized it was written by someone I worked with back in my agency days. Beth is an awesome designer with a great eye. Nice to see her on the front page here. Now, to the content: I often wonder how much we have lost with our endless quest for minimalism. We can't even make buttons look like buttons anymore. Affordances have become anemic at times. Designers who think and care deeply about functional color theory and usable design should be cherished.
- roughly 7mo agoI'm reminded of an article a while back talking about how the change from sodium streetlights to LED streetlights had a whole lot of unforeseen effects on animals, people's sleep patterns, driver awareness and visibility, etc. due to color changes. There was a comment on the article from an old civil engineer saying "no, these were not unforeseen, we actually did the research back in the day to figure out what color the street lights should be, that's why they were the color they were."
- linkjuice4all 7mo agoI think we've learned a couple of times that lighting placement, temperature, and shadow-casting are not ideal [0]. Also some of the newer lighting does actually fade to a different color [1] so it's not just the base temperature of the new lights. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower [1] https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in-led-street-lights-causes-and-practical-solutions/ https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in...
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoI'm sure tons of people along the way "noticed" but if you're selling LEDs or you're paid by the LED people to create marketing to convince people that LEDs are gonna save the planet, you're not gonna bring that up.
- mikestorrent 7mo ago
- anonu 7mo agoSome of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago> He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad. And? Did it?
- vintermann 7mo agoI suppose that's up to us to judge
- bluedino 7mo agoHave always been a fan of colors like that for my desktop background. Maybe because it's calming and I don't realize it? I'm not sure if it started with the teal from Windows 95's default color (hex codes vary based on Google searches), or if it was a purple-ish color from a classic Mac from school. To this day, my work Mac is teal and my personal is purple.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo ago#81D8D0 club, represent! Tiffany green is a Top10 /hn/topbar color for a reason.
- buildbot 7mo agoMmmm it is quite nice
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoYou immediately know when you're logged out (because the topbar goes from soothing to bright orange).
- hkleppe 7mo agowhat, can I change the topbar color?
- hkleppe 7mo agoaha, so I need more karma
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoThat's vanity, for'ya bay-beeee. See you in 221 more +=D
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoYou'll need 251+ karma to do so. <https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors> Apparently tiffany green is only a Top50 contender, these days... a few years ago it had been Top10 (I hadn't checked again until this comment).
- kleton 7mo agoBecause chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
- cmoski 7mo agoOld school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.
- carabiner 7mo agoSu-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
- marginalia_nu 7mo agoYeah I was about to say similar pastel green colors crops up in a lot of Soviet control rooms too.
- karlgkk 7mo ago> We once went on a tour to spot bald eagles in West Tennessee, and upon arrival, a woman with fluffy hair in the state park bathroom told us she had seen 113 bald eagles the day before. We ended up seeing (counts on one hand)…2. As a semi professional eagle enjoyer, if the day before was trash day, then she might have been telling the truth. I’m not joking, they have bald eagle proofed dumpsters in Alaska. They’re basically smart seagulls with talons.
- jaggederest 7mo agoWe took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them. It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
- cynicalsecurity 7mo agoTL;DR: because mid-20th-century designers believed soft green reduced eye strain and improved focus. Basically the same nonsensical belief as in regard the dark mode nowadays. I don't even believe it's true. Green is just an army colour, that's pretty much it. Army uses army colours. Mystery solved.
- amelius 7mo agoIt's the color of plants. A field of grass. Etc. Maybe it even works better with the color of a clear blue sky above it. Anyway, it's intuitive and not rocket science.
- Theodores 7mo agoAs the son of a machine tools salesman, I call the article bullshit. Sometimes things just need to be painted and sometimes you just need that WW2 surplus paint to do the job, with the colour not mattering one bit. With anything, an academic can thread together a theory that neatly joins the dots to sound feasible, but my bet is that 99% of all engineers are stronger at physics than color theory.
- vajrabum 7mo agoUh, I think they didn't use WW2 surplus anything when they build Oak Ridge and Hanford before the end of WW2. I also think given that those two plants were key bits of the Manhattan Project that they didn't cheap out on anything. And the color dude was in fact hired by DuPont who built those two plants and adopted his theories because they increased measured factory productivity and safety. Lastly the OG dude in the article was not an engineer. In fact he was an art school dropout who was very interested in color. So no on the no.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo agoWhy do doctors wear green?
- mc2112 7mo agoGreen is the opposite color of red (blood) on the color wheel and it was supposed to reduce visual fatigue. I think green scrubs have fallen out of favor in many places, but that was one of the prevailing reasons.
- Terr_ 7mo agoSeeing all those two-tone walls with green blow and cream above, I bet it isn't coincidental that those tones resemble plants under an overcast outdoor sky. Either because of unconscious choice, or because some designer theorized that people would be biologically primed to prefer it.
- d-us-vb 7mo agoThe purpose stated in the article in the mind of Birren was to reduce eye strain. I don't think it's so much that humans "prefer" it as such, more that we're very well adapted to work in environments with lots of it.
- djmips 7mo agoGood thought! See also the Go-Away Green comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
- Rantenki 7mo agoWhile I am sure there are stylistic reasons for using that color, there is another common reason why you see blue-green colors in paint, especially in older industrial environments: zinc chromate/phosphate corrosion protective coatings. Zinc chromate primer is the color you see on the interior surfaces of some aircraft, to inhibit corrosion. Zinc phosphate is more of a gray in most cases, although varying paint chemistries result in a spectrum between those two, with seafoam nearly smack in the middle. These are still available today, although the chromate version seems less popular for general use due to toxicity, especially (I assume) in the case of a fire. I have painted quite a few bits of sheet metal with a sea-foam-ish blue-green/gray paint back in the day (30 years or so ago). I don't recall the manufacturer, but it was a zinc conversion coating in nearly exactly that seafoam color, which has probably stolen at least a few years of my life expectancy. The same company sold other paints in a sickly mustard yellow, and close to fire-engine red, all with slightly different chemistries, I assume for different base metals.
- gosub100 7mo agoI remember reading a long time ago about why barns / shipping containers are dark red. and IIRC it's simply because it's a very similar tone to iron oxide and thus the dye was cheapest to produce.
- jasonwatkinspdx 7mo agoNot quite right. Iron oxide is anti-microbial. So a barn painted with it as a pigment will last longer vs mold and such. It's also why large ships all have that red paint color below the waterline. In that case it's copper oxide, which helps slow barnacle growth and similar. Back in the age of sail they even went as far as copper sheet cladding to make the wooden hulls last longer. Copper oxide pigment emerged toward the end of the age of sail / beginning of the steamship era as a more practical alternative.
- HerbManic 7mo agoThis reminding me of something my granddad demonstrated once. He used to work on yachts a fair bit and over the years he noticed the fading patterns for different colour paints. Yellow paint would fade, red paint would fade. But if you mixed them 50/50 into orange, it wouldn't fade. That's why they had so many orange boats in the bay. Figure that one out.
- sayYayToLife 7mo ago[dead]
- next_xibalba 7mo ago> There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible Sure. But this is not one those things.
- whostolemyhat 7mo agoDid you read the next sentence?
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoThat’s exactly the point. What “this” did you think was being referred to?
- next_xibalba 7mo agoYes, of course. Let me clarify: The implication of the quoted sentence is that the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan was awful and indefensible. The author then transitions to “but I want to talk about part of the Manhattan project that isn’t really related to the bombings.” What other explanation would there be for inserting this comment about U.S. history? My comment was addressing the defensibility of the bombings. They may have been awful, but they were fully defensible. Japan was the aggressor, and all indications were that both the U.S. and Japan were going to see millions of casualties as part of an invasion of the home islands.
- wredcoll 7mo agoI'm not sure how much it really matters but it is mildly annoying when people's brains just shut off when they hear atomic/nuclear. It's perfectly reasonable to make an argument that they were "not needed" in terms of ending ww2, it's much, much more difficult to argue that fewer people would have died if they weren't used.
- fortran77 7mo agoI'm with you.
- 7mo ago
- pbohun 7mo agoThis makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
- leontloveless 7mo ago[dead]
- imglorp 7mo agoWhat's also interesting is the Russians adopted a similar color for aircraft cockpits, eg this MiG 31. https://cdn.jetphotos.com/full/2/75332_1265484412.jpg https://cdn.jetphotos.com/full/2/75332_1265484412.jpg Meanwhile the Yanks stayed with mil-spec gray on a similar ship, the F-15: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-15_Eagle_Cockpit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-15_Eagle_Cockpit.jpg
- bennyp101 7mo agoI remember when I first started out in a job that I should have a green poster nearby to look at to "relax your eyes" every now and then.
- bloak 7mo agoAlso hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
- emmelaich 7mo agoYes, a feature of the movie "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is a sort of sickly green. I think hospitals have moved entirely away from green, probably because of its association with industry and asylum use.
- heraldgeezer 7mo agoWhy don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoI had our maintenance department custom paint my beige desk black when I moved into my office.
- voxaai 7mo ago[flagged]
- CrazyStat 7mo ago> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoBased on other comments Russian cockpits were based on the same theory and not independent.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- markdown 7mo agoLOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday
- bronlund 7mo ago"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."
- dopatraman 7mo agothe Burt Reynolds poster
- dubya 7mo agoDefinitely Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI.
- skyberrys 7mo agoIt's a color of green reminiscent of Tiffany blue, I mean both colors have the intent of the original color but at the same time there is a well washed feel to them. It's both unnatural and expected for the function of these colors.
- microtherion 7mo agoI wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.
- ktokarev 7mo agogood one, UX matters indeed
- themarogee 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- abcde666777 7mo agoFunny - one of those things you don't really wonder about until someone points it out, but which proves pretty interesting once you're aware of it.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rodface 7mo agoThank you for this share, because it rings close to another fascination of mine: the shade of green/teal that is the panel color of a great many Soviet aircraft cockpits. It's not the same as the shade of these industrial control panels[1], but it seems to me that they are in a family together. I would include the Windows 95 default background color in that same family; I find it relaxing enough that I still use it today. :) [1]https://www.google.com/images?q=soviet%20aircraft%20cockpits https://www.google.com/images?q=soviet%20aircraft%20cockpits
- 6bb32646d83d 7mo agoI was just visiting the cold war era nuclear ICBM control room bunker in Arizona and noticed this color everywhere. Timely article! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f84e69e4b021b24483c6ef/e4abc293-4c1b-46ca-9a46-dfaf507ae524/DSCF3399.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f84e69e4b021...
- 6510 7mo agoBetween real jobs I once worked at a factory that paid the bare minimum wages, gave zero hour contracts and had the most unstable work hours I've ever seen. People who weren't needed showed up only to be send home, people who weren't planned for the day were suppose to be ready to jump in the entire day only to not be called for 3 weeks. They did shit like send one out of a team of 6 home just to see if 5 people could still do it. They would go out of their way to keep up for example for 2-4 hours but couldn't so someone else was called in for the last two hours. I asked about the horizontal colored bars painted on the wall in the lunch room. It was the strangest selection of colors. Each bar about a fist width. It seemed someone went out of their way to invent the most boring bland colors possible. They told me the factory had spend over 100 k on a color expert to increase productivity. Everyone who worked there for some time knew this. I thought I'd observe the effect. Someone was released from the factory floor for 10 minutes because they by accident worked enough hours in a row to be entitled to a lunch break, in their own time of course. They sat down at a table carefully positioned to look straight at the color bars. And then it started! I could see on their face their internal dialog as if talking with the hundred thousand euro color consultant. The sandwich went only half way up to their mouth and they slipped into a catatonic state looking at the colors. It was facinating, I just had to see more. Turned out half the factory had this moment with this colored wall! I didn't have to ask them what that expression was. I could look at the wall myself and the internal dialog stated immediately: How the fuck do they expect me to pay my bills if I have to wait by the phone all week but only get two 3 hour shifts? Why did they have to spend a hundred thousand on colors to make me more productive? It was impossible to think anything else. It was almost a blessing to go back to the high speed conveyor belt. If I didn't see it myself I wouldn't believe color theory works in magical ways.
- themafia 7mo agoThe poster of Magnum P.I. really tied the place together dude.
- aidenn0 7mo agoMy mom had that exact poster in her home-office.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7mo ago> I designed a font called “Parts List” ... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"
- beedle_mcdeedle 7mo agoI work as an automation technician for my province's electrical utility in Quebec Canada and all the hydro dams in my region still use this color for the control room paneling! I work in and around this color every day and it hasn't gotten old yet. The dams have been around for nearly a century and I've always appreciated their old industrial vibe.
- paradox460 7mo agoGrowing up in Los Alamos, it's not just the lab that adhered to this color standard. Everything that had any vague connection to government, be it the post office, hospital, county council building, public access TV station, and schools were all colored in these various colors. And many things that weren't connected directly still used them, likely because they bought paint as surplus. One of a few elevators in town, part of a small shopping center, was sea foam, as were the lamp posts along downtown streets, and finally, the doors in the Posse Shack were also green, but that's likely because they were directly taken from the lab
- pvab3 7mo agoNot even just Los Alamos. It was a very common color for schools and hospitals
- paradox460 7mo agoWhen we moved away, the new schools and such didn't have that color. Either the grey fad was just taking root at that time, or it hadn't penetrated the tri cities (home to the Hanford project) quite as well as it did Los Alamos
- anthk 7mo agoThe old forniture in my Elementary school (the whole 90's) had that green tone until ~1998-1999.
- userbinator 7mo agoTo me, it's very evocative of mid-century industrial design. Detroit Diesel painted their engines a similar color too, although theirs is called "Alpine Green". ("Seafoam" brings to mind the engine additive too.)
- vharuck 7mo ago>In the fall of 1919, Faber Birren entered the Art Institute at the University of Chicago, only to drop out in the spring of 1921 to commit himself to self-education in color, as such a program didn’t exist. The German word for color is "Farbe," which is an anagram of this guy's name. So I'm chalking one more point up to the universe being a simulation written by a cheeky developer.
- ydj 7mo agoFunny, when I got tired of trying to find a nice desktop background I just started using a solid color of muted blue or green. I never read about this specific usage of colors before but I bet I saw something somewhere that clued me in on this color.
- biofox 7mo agoReminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s. https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-software-and-technology/images/interactive-desktop.png https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...
- jnellis 7mo agoThe 68 Ford Thunderbird (w/ suicide doors.) Mustangs also came in this color. https://imgur.com/a/BbzHVMn https://imgur.com/a/BbzHVMn
- fortran77 7mo agoWait, what? Ending the war in Japan was "indefensible"?
- cjohnson318 7mo agoI went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.
- xyzzy123 7mo agoGreat discussion on colour theory but I think it skips over the fact that chemistry and economics were also real constraints. Paints that don't fade easily, chemically inert, durable etc and can be produced in enormous volume are not that common. Practical stuff like, how easy does it catch fire, do solvents degrade it. Most important: is it CHEAP? Also by 1944 there would have been a ready made supply chain due to demand from the navy, which would have picked it for similar reasons and consumed it in enormous volume. I think, practically, control rooms are chrome oxide green (you get to add as much titanium as you like - thats cheap as dirt too EDIT: it would have been lead actually in the 40s) for much the same reason that barns are red.
- justonceokay 7mo agoI doubt the manhattan project had an issue funding paint
- xyzzy123 7mo agoThink for a minute about why they worked in shacks. Also worth noting that Birren was a paid consultant for DuPont - the company that made the paint. From that perspective alone you would kinda expect he is gonna pick colours they already produce reliably at scale. He also consulted for army, coast guard and navy so whatever colours you pick for hazard marking in an industrial setting have to be _vaguely_ congruent or you're going to cause accidents.
- rippeltippel 7mo agoMany primary school classrooms in Italy had walls painted in that same colour, likely for the same reason.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ourmandave 7mo agoAt the end... PS: I have an old friend whose dad still works at the Uranium plant in Oak Ridge. I told him that I was surprised that almost all of the facilities had been torn down, and he just looked at me straight in the face and said, “Who said it’s actually gone?” Noted.
- razkaplan 7mo ago[flagged]
- anymouse123456 7mo agoLots of old machinery from the era (Mills, Lathes, and such) also carried these colors. Truly beautiful.
- zeafoamrun 7mo ago[dead]
- gorfian_robot 7mo agoI reported this to 99pi as an Article of Interest
- NoSalt 7mo agoI was in the Air Force back in the late '80s, and SO MANY of the old equipment I worked with fit quite nicely into this color scheme. I can almost smell the old electronics now. It also reminds me of the AWESOME aesthetic that is the nixie tube.
- mprovost 7mo agoIt looks like almost the same colour of those David Clark headsets which seem to be ubiquitous in airplane cockpits or helicopters. It's even the background of their corporate logo.
- bensonn 7mo agoIt looked like Google Maps to me so I made a comparison. What is old is new again? https://imgur.com/a/b6HCx78 https://imgur.com/a/b6HCx78
- abetusk 7mo agoI'm surprised no one actually listed the hex colors (the one listed by ProllyInfamous isn't seafoam green?). Wikipedia has it at #9FE2BF [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_green#Sea_foam_green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_green#Sea_foam_green