Why is purple the colour of engineering, specifically in Ontario? (I
don't want overlap with what I've already found, or the fictitious
story I supplied.)
Background:
Engineers dye themselves purple for frosh week at several Ontario
schools and possibly others. (The University of Western Ontario,
Queen's, The University of Toronto.)
I've found fictitious answers here:
http://engsoc.queensu.ca/polegame/LegendWeb/Legends/Tradition/index.htm
http://mes.mcmaster.ca/culture/canada.php
And I've written a fictitious answer for The University of Western
Ontario's Engineering Frosh Week Program here:
The Fictitious History of Purple
Purple doesn?t actually exist. You?ll find ?purple? in the mind of an
artsie, but engineers intuitively know that it doesn?t exist
objectively. There?s absolutely no wavelength of light that can
properly be called ?purple?? artsies only perceive purple when a
mixture of blue waves and red waves hit their retinas.
An engineer once tried to explain this simple concept to a group of
artsies with a pencil-sketch of a spectrum, ?Okay, this is the last
time I?ll explain this to you artsies: Red, with , is at this end
and blue, , is close to the other end.? The artsies scratched their
heads, but the engineer continued through his logic. ?There?s no point
where the two overlap, unlike the orange that appears between yellow
and red. Spectrally speaking, you can?t have a single wavelength that
is a ?reddish-blue? or a ?bluish-red!? ? When the confused group of
artsies pulled-out their color-wheels and paintbrushes, the engineer
knew it was time to leave.
There?s a history behind purple for engineers. And this history is
why we ceremoniously dye ourselves purple during frosh week.
According to one legend set in the sixth century, an engineer was
walking his dog on the beach. After biting into a mollusk, the dog?s
mouth turned an unusual color. The engineer soon designed a process
(using salt, heat and water) to extract the dye from the shellfish and
he quickly became as rich as kings! Purple was so expensive that the
only people who could afford the dye were royalty. The dye was
prohibitively expensive until the 1800s, when another engineer
designed the process to create synthetic dye. Was it a coincidence
that the first synthetic dye discovered was purple?
Perhaps one of purple?s most important associations with engineering
is through military engineers. During World War 1 and World War 2,
British engineers wore a purple patch on their shoulder. The
engineers served their country with dedicated?even stubborn?valor, and
often went down with the vessel while keeping its battle-ravaged
engine seaworthy. The engineers of the ships worked so hard that the
salt in their sweat and the spray of the sea bled the esteemed purple
dye in their patch permanently into their skin. The military
engineers?and their purple patch?were associated with bravery,
determination and skill. It?s no surprise that Western Engineering,
in the city of London, adopted purple?the British colonial color for
engineering?in its engineering traditions.
During the war, field engineers used ?purple wire? during testing.
When marine-mine firing circuits detonated overly quickly due to
magnetic fields created by the current flowing through the wires, it
was the brave field engineers who installed their purple wire to
successfully work around problems during testing and debugging.
It?s stories like this that make so many frosh fanatical about dying
themselves purple on their first week. We use a safe medical dye, so
don?t be afraid to get entirely purple. Make sure you?re ready and
wear clothes that can get purple... And don?t waste your time
explaining the concept of purple to an artsie. |
