In 1919, a University of Chicago art student named Faber Birren dropped out after two years because no program existed for what he wanted to study: the effect color had on a person's emotional state. He interviewed physicists and psychologists, ran his own experiments — at one point slathering his bedroom in red vermillion to see if living inside it would drive him insane — and by 1933 had talked his way into corporate offices as a self-appointed color consultant.
His big break came from a Chicago meat company. White walls, Birren told the butchers, were killing their product — he ran tests with colored backdrops and found that cool blue-green tones behind the display case made cuts look fresher and redder. Business picked up, and Birren soon landed DuPont as a client. When DuPont designed the Manhattan Project's nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Hanford Site in Washington state, Birren's color system came along.
Designer Beth Mathews traced the seafoam green coating those reactor control rooms to his industrial safety code, which became a national standard in 1944.
The code assigned each color a job: fire red for emergency stops, solar yellow for falling hazards, alert orange for dangerous machinery, safety green for first-aid stations. And that distinctive light green on the walls? Its job was to reduce eye fatigue in rooms where a single mistake could cause a catastrophe. Birren wrote that soft greens established "a non-distracting environment," which is exactly the vibe you want when a 24-foot graphite reactor is humming on the other side of the wall.
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