Industrial Green

[ManofKent]

Okay, I'm not sure where the best place to post this nagging question is (mods feel free to move it), but whilst deciding on what colour to paint doors, windows, corrugated iron, cranes etc. I kept coming up with mid-green. Does anyone know why mid-green paint seems to have been the defacto choice for industrial equipment and buildings since the 19th Century (and possibly earlier)?

[gpplumy]

Not sure. I know the steelworks had a thing for blue and cream inside. A light green existed for a period at the beginning and then mid point in time. Many outside stansions are now wasp stripes for the lower half 

[Sandhole]

The Booth Rodley steam crane on the Trafford Park Estates lines in the late 70's, was a rusty black.

[Paul H Vigor]

At the time 'mid green' might have been a light-stable colour - and cheap to produce?

[Nearholmer]

I think the colour is middle chrome green, and as Paul says: cheap and stable.

 

It wasn’t just industrial premises, but multiple councils, machinery makers etc etc that slapped it over everything, and I think it is know as “institutional green” (*) because it was in/on every public building. It was quite a common colour for the lower parts of interior wall in heavy traffic areas like corridors, as well as for external use.

 

The GWR painted their locos with it, and the SR used it as one of their building colours.

It was made with lead chromate (yellow) and Prussian Blue, which I think makes it very good at resisting (poisoning) the fungi that cause wood rot, but it was popular because it was less poisonous than the alternative greens, some of which were seriously deadly to users.

 

 

(*)  ‘institutional green’ seems to refer to a less saturated, paler-looking, colour that was used for larger surfaces indoors, which I think was a more ‘let down’ version than we are discussing here.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 17, 2021 by Nearholmer

[doilum]

On a practical level, Humbrol matt 88 & 120 are a good starting point bearing in mind that the colour tended to fade with age.

[Nearholmer]

Faded in some environments, darkened in others, due to the way the pigments reacted to different atmospheric pollutants. The SR version used on buildings certainly faded-out to a quite blue shade over a long time.

 

I called it middle chrome green, and it might actually be best to ignore/omit the "middle", because green paint made using Lead Chromate and Prussian Blue pigments came in a wide variety of hues and saturations according to the exact recipe (white lead and linseed oil as a base, plus the two colour pigments, for painting woodwork and metalwork). The "middle" simply indicates somewhere in the middle of the possible degrees of saturation - lots of pigment gave "dark" or even "vanishing" (nearly black-looking); less pigment gave brighter.

 

I have a feeling that even Emerald Green [No, Emerald specifically used Ultramarine, not Prussian Blue] and Brunswick Green were made using these pigments, although I think Brunswick traditionally has a dash of an earth pigment in it too [some recipes say a dash of lamp black].

 

Apologies for rambling on about this - I think it all goes back to the lamp post near our house when I was a tiny child, which was painted one of these middling chrome greens!

 

PS: Just found this, which gives a brilliant insight into the imprecision of paint colours at a period when painters and decorators were still mixing their own, but some ready-mixed paints had already come onto the market. Look out for words like "enough", the lack of measured quantities, and the dodges to use cheap pigments (lots of black in invisible green is a definite cheat!). Malachite Green doesn't even get a mention, probably because the pigment cost a fortune until it was synthesised a bit later.

 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cyclopedia_of_Painting/Color_Mixing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 18, 2021 by Nearholmer