Life Before Color

Everything was so black and white before the 1900s

Remember when we were all just black, white, and grey orbs of flesh? What do you mean you don’t recall those days? Oh, maybe you were too young. Or possibly not yet even shoved from the womb. You’re saying you didn’t realize our ancestors existed only in shades of grey?

When discussing “the old days” in Social Studies lessons one of my grade 2 students scratched her ear and said, “Oh, like you mean in the times before we were color?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, thinking she was referring to some of the photographs we’d been investigating. Or possibly to the bus-sized TVs that only used to show black and white programs.

In this rural community, I knew she was definitely not referring to skin shades. Sadly, most of my students believe the peachy shade of Band-aid “normal” is the only one that exists. Realistically it’s all that many of these country bumpkins have seen.

“Like how us and the world used to be all black and white until color arrived.” I almost started to laugh until I realized that this kid was serious.

She honestly believed that everything existed solely in hues of black, white, and grey — until color suddenly and miraculously breezed in. Around the time photos of her great-grandparents morphed polychromatic. Or maybe later. Did the black-and-white dude who landed on the moon bring back blues, greens, and yellows?

I started imagining what a drastic and stark change that would be. And so I decided to try a little photo exhibit to compare pre-color spectrum world to what our ancestors woke up to on the day color appeared!

Imagine discovering that your laundry tubs weren’t as boring as the Australian wool gotchies you lathered up in them. That tricky, brilliant manufacturer adding non-existent pigment somehow to their label! How much more fun and exciting would laundry day be as you oohed and ahhed over the kaleidoscope of fibers slipping between your calloused fingers?

What flair life in technicolor would add to your Saturday morning in the barber chair. Good thing Proto-Indo-European languages had the foresight to create the word reudh! When our predecessors finally saw the ruddy red of barber stripes we already had a name for it.

And the color that rhymes only with “‘sporange,’ an uncommon botanical term for a part of a fern”? Pre-orange meal times must have been so bland and boring. No wonder “eat the rainbow” only recently became a phenomenon. How could we know about carotenoids and flavonoids if we didn’t even realize fruit and veggies had non-grey tints let alone ‘oids’?

What a challenging and boring world our foreparents endured. And how thankful I am that our retinas evolved and that colors popped into the scene. Ah, the old days. No cars. No computers. No color.

©Jennifer J. McDougall 2021