We take house paint for granted as a way to decorate our homes and protect surfaces against drying, rot, and the elements. Yet this seemingly simple product has a long, fascinating history – much too long and fascinating to summarize in just one essay. A brief history, however, is better than no history at all. In that spirit, we present a few snapshots of house paint's evolution in order to heighten your appreciation of it, and to provide some perspective on humans' need to secure and beautify their dwelling places.
40,000 thousand years ago, cave inhabitants combined various substances with animal fat to make paint, which they used to add pictures and colors to the walls of their crude homes. Red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal were all employed as color elements. Starting around 3150 B.C., ancient Egyptian painters mixed a base of oil or fat with color elements like ground glass or semiprecious stones, lead, earth, or animal blood. These ancient peoples preferred black, white, red, blue, green, and yellow. At the turn of the 14th century, house painters in England created guilds, which established standards for the profession and kept trade secrets under lock and key. By the 17th century, technology and new practices in house paint grew.
In this era of reality TV and manufactured celebrities, it can be hard to remember the definition of modesty. For the Pilgrims, who populated the American colonies in the 17th century, modesty meant avoiding all displays of joy, wealth, or vanity. Even painting your home was deemed very immodest and highly sacrilegious. In 1630, a rebellious Charlestown preacher decorated his house's interior with paint and was thus brought up on criminal charges of sacrilege.
Even colonial Puritanism, however, failed to silence the demand for house paint. Anonymous authors wrote "cookbooks" that offered recipes for various kinds and colors of paint. One oft-used process, called the "Dutch method," mixed ground oyster shells and lime which made a white wash; iron or copper oxide for red or green color, respectively could then be added to the mix. Colonial paint "cooks" also used items from the pantry, including milk, egg whites, coffee, and rice, to turn out their illegal product.
From the 17th century until the 19th, oil and water were the primary bases for paint production. Each held certain colors better than others, and there were differences in cost and durability between them, too. Water-based paints were used for ceilings and plaster walls, and oils were used for joinery. Often times, homeowners would request walls that looked like marble, wood, or bronze and ceilings that looked like a blue sky with fat white clouds. Painters of the time routinely fulfilled such requests, which seem fairly eccentric by today's standards. In 1638, a historic home known as Ham House, located in Surrey, England, was renovated. Renovating the home was a multiple-step process, involving the usage of primer, a couple of undercoats, and a finishing coat of paint to show paneling and cornices in the home. During this time period in paint's evolutionary history, oil and pigment were hand-mixed to make a stiff paste, which is still done to this day. Well-ground pigment tends to disperse almost completely in oil. Before the 18th century, hand-grinding often exposed painters to an excess of white-lead powder, which could bring about lead poisoning. Even though lead paint was toxic, it was popular during this time because of its durability, and even today it's difficult to replicate that hardiness in paint. Painters did eventually add air extraction systems in their workshops to reduce the health risks occurring from grinding lead-based pigment. Not until 1978 did the U.S. finally ban the sale of lead house paint.
Paint production transformed dramatically during the 1700s. In 1700 in Boston, MA, the first American paint mill opened its doors. In 1718, the Englishman Marshall Smith devised a "Machine or Engine for the Grinding of Colours," which prompted a sort of arms race with regard to grinding pigment efficiently. In 1741, the English company Emerton and Manby publicized the "Horse-Mills" it used to grind pigment, which allowed it to sell paint at prices its rivals couldn't match. Owner Elizabeth Emerton bragged: "One Pound of Colour ground in a Horse-Mill will paint twelve Yards of Work, whereas Colour ground any other Way, will not do half that Quantity."
As any steampunk aficionado will tell you, the turn of the 19th century meant the rise of steam power. Paint mills were no inconsistency; at this point in time, most of them ran on steam. Another, more significant improvement also occurred around this time: Nontoxic zinc oxide became a viable base for white pigment, thanks to European ingenuity it came to the US in 1855.
By the end of the 1800s, roller mills had started to grind pigment as well as grain, and the guild system that had organized English house painters for centuries became a network of trade unions. Mass production of paint was no longer a pipe dream, and linseed oil, a cheap binding agent that also helped protect wood, made it even easier.
Decorating a home with paint became extremely popular in the 19th century. After all, paint made surfaces washable and, by sealing in wood's natural oils, kept walls from becoming either too moist or too dry.
Sherwin Williams, a giant behemoth in the paint world today, was founded in 1866. The company was the first maker of ready-to-use paint; its original product, raw umber in oil, debuted in 1873. Shortly after, cofounder Henry Sherwin invented a resealable tin can.
Benjamin Moore, one of Sherwin Williams top competitors, was born in 1883. Twenty-four years passed, and the company created a research department headed up by one chemist. Ever since, Benjamin Moore has contributed a stand-out discoveries in paint technology, but its color-matching system, unveiled in 1982 and wholly computer-based, is unmatched paint is still lucrative today; around $20.9 billion in paint was sold in 2006.
Though house paint is most frequently applied to the surfaces of a home, many artists have used it to bring their canvases to life. American painter John Frost, who began his career as an artist in 1919, used house paint to chronicle the history of his hometown, the tiny village of Marblehead, Mass. Picasso and many of his contemporaries used it as well. Even contemporary artists, like Nik Ehm, use house paint on occasion.
Mid-20th century is when necessity became the mother of invention. World War II contributed to the supply of linseed oil's demise, so chemists used a combination of alcohols and acids to create alkyds, artificial resins that are a substitute for natural oil.
Most house paint today is acrylic, or water-based, paint; however, milk paint, which reached the height of its popularity in the 19th century for its unassuming hues, is cropping up again thanks to the environmental movement.
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To be general, milk paint doesn't contain volatile organic compounds, commonly known as VOCs. Latex paint, however, does can include VOCs, making them potentially dangerous to pets and humans. If you're exposed to VOCs for an extended period of time, it could lead to nerve or organ damage, and it may even cause cancer. Thankfully, most paint companies have low or zero VOC paint available. By EPA standards, the term, "zero-VOC," means that each liter of paint has less than 5 grams of VOCs. Other non-VOC alternates are clay and water-based paints. If you suffer from allergies, you must used low-VOC paint. In fact, they offer practical advantages no matter what your circumstances, since their lack of strong odor lets you occupy freshly painted rooms relatively soon.
While paint is seemingly simplistic, it has evolved over the centuries to our financial, health, and aesthetic needs. That something so basic can allow us to express ourselves so strikingly, and elevate our mood so effectively, is almost a miracle. The next time you open a can of paint, consider how far through time it's traveled to add a little beauty to your life…