JF Ptak Science Books: The Color Green in the History of Squares

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The History of Ideas Blog by John Ptak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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The Color Green in the History of Squares

JF Ptak Science Books

There is an invisible thread running through this blog on the history of squares, starting with Euclid and winding its way through Mondrian, Klee and Malevich and Boullee, atom bomb resistant countries, pixels, perfect, Times, magic, and so on. I don't think that I've ever touched on what might be my own solitary and perhaps-wrong observation on the preponderance of green squares in 1950's linoleum flooring. As I said, this might be because of my own faulty receptors--and even if I'm slightly correct the color I think doesn't mean or imply anything in particular. Perhaps the abundance of green comes from a left-over paint or dye that a manufacturer decided to bump into flooring; or perhaps green just looked better to the readers of LIFE magazine than other colors. Be that as it may, there is some loose strand of memory that gets activated every time I see green squares in flooring of the 1950's, and I just wanted to say that I noticed it.