Collection: Glassware Pigment in Paint

“The history of pigments and of the binders that make paint is really the history of art. In the early 50's Rohm and Haas invented the Acrylic Emulsion as a paint binder and pretty much revolutionized paint. Milton Croom founded Cal-Tone Paints in the early 50's and was the first to use that new emulsion called AC33 in paint and sell it to the public. Croom Acrylic was the first acrylic paint to be manufactured and actually sold to the public in the USA. It was located at 310 South West St in Raleigh. Junction West bar is now in that building  He was kind of a beta tester for R&H. He adopted the new point of purchase color machine with 13 pigments of which these are photos I took in the late late 70’s  over 3 or 4 years. The colors were designated by letters and with them millions of color words could be created at the point of purchase. I was a color matcher and paint chemist for him in the 60's-80's. I was fascinated with paint. Pretty much all the physical and chemical concepts can be explored in a gallon. These were created by what I call a sherk (a shake/jerk) by me and then  shot on Kodachrome at the paint store with a macro lens. They all “came into being” in a split second by my “big bang event”. Maybe 5% of thousands I looked at were winners in my eye. It cost a lot of money to shoot slide film and really limited my choices.  But there was no cost for the paint (except for the film) as they were put on shaker and sold to the customer right after the photo made. They had a life of at most 7 minutes as could not keep the customers waiting too long. Not only art but pretty much every basic concept of physics and chemistry can be found in a gallon of paint. From solutions, to suspensions, to emulsions to chemical reactions at both the macro level and the molecular level. Fluid mechanics. Not to mention crystallography and mineralogy. ”