Abraham Lincoln, 5YR/3/1, Color, and Chemistry

By Jim Schmidt
Senior Scientific Advisor
ABC Laboratories
www.abclabs.com

I may be a chemist and subject matter expert by day, but I'm an avid history enthusiast by night (and by lunch!), and I'm always looking for great stories where history and chemistry intersect.

The past four years has been heavy in events commemorating the Sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the American Civil War, 1861-65.  This past month, in particular, marked the anniversary of the tragic assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the journey of his "funeral train" from Washington, DC, to his adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois.

It turns out that the official rail car that carried Lincoln to Springfield has an interesting story of chemistry and color that received recent attention in Chemical & Engineering News.¹

In the mid-1990s, while Dr. Wayne Wesolowski was a chemistry professor at Benedictine University (Illinois), he directed the "Lincoln Train Project" with the goal of crafting a scale (15-foot) replica of Lincoln’s funeral car (Wesolowski is also an avid and expert model railroad enthusiast). At that time, though, he had to guess its color on the basis of period (and conflicting) conflicting accounts.

[Note: I've had the privilege of seeing one of the few replicas that Dr. Wesolowski and his team made; it is magnificent.]

Although the original funeral train car had burned in a 1911 fire, he tracked down one of its windows, removed years before the fire. The window's owner allowed Dr. Wesolowski to analyze a piece of the trim. With the help of the laboratory staff of the Arizona State Museum, they examined chips of paint from window trim with a light microscope and - using cards from the Munsell color system - they found a match with "5YR/3/1," a deep maroon shade, about 16 parts red to 6
parts black (and darker than the color he used for his 1990s model).

There's still work to be done and at the time of the article, Dr. Wesolowski indicated he would look for funding and collaborators for more specific chemical characterization (for example, UV-VIS spectral characterization).

As illustrated by the story above, color is a very interesting physical property - one of many that our experienced and talented scientists examine in our laboratory (sometimes using the Munsell system as Dr. Wesolowski and his colleagues did).

It's also an important property from a regulatory and safety perspective: data on color (as well as properties such as odor or physical state) of a chemical or product can be used to confirm or provide supportive information on its identity; it is also used in reviewing the production or formulating process used to produce a product; it may also be important for safety or emergency purposes in identifying unlabeled materials involved in accidents or spills or by hospitals or poison control centers to aid in their identification.

We all have a favorite color² - but for this week, at least, mine is 5YR/3/1.

¹"Abraham Lincoln's Missing Pigment," C&E News, June 17, 2013, p. 34.
²Blue!