Orange: A history

It’s a colour, but it’s also the fruit, the butterfly’s wing, the flash of sun in a rock and the glow of the infant universe… It’s far more than a narrow band of wavelengths. In this lyrical story, Ashley Hay illuminates the history of orange and how it may have made us human.

It’s a spring night in south-east Queensland, just before the rising of a slightly waning moon. A group of us are sitting in a field around the bright glow of a fire pit (no bans tonight) – adults, teenagers, dogs. We pass around snacks; we pass stories as well.

The fire’s orange plays beneath this darkness, softening what we can see of each other’s features in the same way this holiday has softened the speed at which we’re living for a while and made it possible to see what’s underneath our normal pace.

For American anthropologist Polly Wiessner, firelight provided a crucial impetus for the human work of storytelling. Through time spent with the Ju/’hoansi (the !Kung bushmen of Botswana and Namibia) across more than four decades, Wiessner explored changes brought about by human control of fire on ‘anatomy, social and residential arrangements’, looking past the impact of fire on cooking to its impact on social activities and the development of human imagination.

Where earlier hypotheses suggested that stories grew out of a need to share information about resources, Wiessner focused on their function in terms of people understanding other people; of people ­finding ways of talking that stepped beyond the requests and negotiations that mark out a day’s work; and of people developing empathy. As she writes in a seminal 2014 PNAS paper:

“Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength, elicited understanding, trust, and sympathy, and built positive reputations for qualities like humour, congeniality, and innovation. The capacity for expanding the imagination by night may have deep roots, ­extending back to the regular use of fire in encampments some 200,000–300,000 years ago, a time when evidence for broader intergroup interactions begins to crop up in the archaeological record.”

There’s now evidence to suggest that the flickering of fire not only sparked the growth of our imagination but also impacted the scope and aspiration of artistic output. Recent research on the Upper Palaeolithic plaquettes of Montastruc, France – portable stones engraved with images of creatures including a mammoth and a swimming reindeer – suggest that these were displayed close to fires, which essentially animated the figures.

“Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength.”

In “Art by Firelight”, published in PLOS One in 2022, Andy Needham and his team describes how “the interaction of engraved stone and roving firelight made engraved forms appear dynamic and alive, suggesting this may have been important in their use. Human neurology is particularly attuned to interpreting shifting light and shadow as movement … with the dynamic light cast from a hearth bringing the depictions to life.”

The timing of human control of fire is widely – one could even say hotly – debated: estimates range from 1.6 million years ago to much more recent eras. But how far back can the colour of firelight take us? How far does that orange glow go?

Betwixe yelow and reed

The relationship between white light and the visible spectrum is a well-told story in Western science. The colours of the spectrum are called out in various songs and nursery rhymes: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But the specific inclusion of orange required a critical cultural and historical element on top of the scientific observation that split white light into brilliance.

The science was realised in 1672, when Isaac Newton published his first major paper, ­
“…Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors”, in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. It describes experiments he had begun in the previous decade: “having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts”, Newton allowed a beam of light to pass through a glass prism, a child’s toy that he had bought at a fair. From this came his seminal observations of the splitting of white light into a spectrum of component colours – and he named five. Red. Yellow. Green. Blue. Violet.

Three years later, in Lectiones Opticae, Newton requantified the spectrum required to make white light so that it contained seven elemental colours – adding orange and violet. One Newtonian biographer, Patricia Fara, describes this as him allowing rainbows to “conform to his Pythagorean vision of a harmonious universe whose mathematical characteristics corresponded with the seven notes of the musical scale”. Newton himself delineated this recast spectrum as “the original or primary colours [of] Red, yellow, Green, Blew, & a violet purple; together with Orang, Indico, & an indefinite varietie of intermediate gradations”.

But this fundamental understanding that white light is “the most surprising and wonderful composition” required the recent arrival of the word orange in the English language.

Because before this, the colour was known in English as yellow-red. As Yale University’s David Scott Kastan and the artist Stephen Farthing note in their collaboration On Colour (2018), until oranges arrived in Europe from the east, “there was no orange as such in the colour spectrum”:

“When the first Europeans saw the fruit they were incapable of exclaiming about its brilliant orange colour. They recognised the colour but didn’t yet know its name. Often they referred to oranges as golden apples. Not until they knew them as oranges did they see them as orange.”

“Orange was one of the earliest colours to emerge in the universe.”

The first recorded mention of orange as a colour relates to clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister and later the Queen of Scotland, in 1502 – a scant century after Chaucer, in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, had to describe a rooster dreaming of a fox whose “color was betwixe yelow and reed”. This literary palette-mixing was his best option in the 1390s.

Once oranges had arrived from India and became more common and visible in markets and kitchens, “the name of the fruit [provided] the name for the colour”. Within decades, Kastan and Farthing point out, “people could imagine that the fruit was called an orange simply because it was”. Which gave Newton the colour-name to include in his revised seven-part spectrum in 1675. Even now, orange remains distinct as a colour whose few English synonyms stand for objects as much as hues. Think tangerines. Think apricots. Its semantics set it apart.

In the first crucible

Though only a recent arrival in the English language, orange was one of the earliest colours to emerge in the evolution of the universe. The Big Bang was not some blinding flash of light so much as an expanding space filled with energy. As US astrophysicist Brian Koberlein explains:

“At first, temperatures were so high that light didn’t exist. The cosmos had to cool for a fraction of a second before photons could appear. After about 10 seconds, the universe entered the photon epoch. Protons and neutrons had cooled into the nuclei of hydrogen and helium, and space was filled with a plasma of nuclei, electrons and photons. At that time, the temperature of the universe was about one billion degrees Kelvin.”

It took another 380,000 years for the universe to cool enough for these nuclei and electrons to bind into atoms, allowing what we call “colour” to emerge. By which time, Koberlein says, “the observable universe was a transparent cosmic cloud of hydrogen and helium 84 million ­light-years across”. It registered a temperature of 3,000 degrees Kelvin, giving it “a bright orange-white glow, similar to the warm light of an old 60-watt light bulb” – or “an orange glow similar to firelight”. Always a good place, fireside, to start a story.

And so, for the first few million years of its incarnation, the universe itself was orange.

Monarchs to minerals

Orange has proliferated across Earth’s natural world, from the startlingly solid avian brilliance of the Guianian cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola rupicola) to sunstone or heliolite, a type of feldspar whose sunlike flashes of light come from traces of copper, hematite or goethite embedded “parallel to one of the crystallographic planes within the stone”. Orange is also particularly common in butterflies, from the famous migrating monarchs and Gulf fritillaries of the Americas (and beyond), through butterflies on all the continents, on to one of Australia’s most endangered butterfly species, and one that is just settling in.

The Australian fritillary – Argynnis hyperbius inconstans – has a 94% likelihood of becoming extinct by 2040. These fritillaries begin life as “jet black caterpillars with a vibrant orange racing stripe and large spikes along their backs”, transforming into “stunning orange and black butterflies”.

According to 2021 media reports of Australia’s projected butterfly extinctions, no one had managed to collect or photograph an Australian fritillary this century, “although a butterfly expert observed a single individual flying near Port Macquarie in 2015”.

By comparison, the tawny coster (Acraea terpsicore, originally an inhabitant of India and Sri Lanka) reached Australia in 2016, rapidly establishing itself from Broome to Groote Eylandt and expected to move further into the country’s north-east. This is only Australia’s third known butterfly incursion, after the white cabbage moth in the 1920s and the monarch in the 1870s.

Natural orange colour – the orange of pumpkins, sweet potatoes and oranges themselves, as well as birds’ feathers and butterflies’ wings – come from carotene: orange-red photosynthetic pigments that are one of four caretonoids. Like chlorophyll, these pigments can convert sunlight into chemical energy. They take their name from the colour of the carrot – a colour they provide – in which they were first discovered in 1831.

But oranges (the fruit) had been involved in an earlier scientific study. In 1747, in the world’s first clinical trial, Scottish physician James Lind explored the efficacy of oranges and lemons in preventing scurvy amongst sailors. Despite sailors being given citrus juice shortly thereafter, the connection between scurvy and a vitamin deficiency wasn’t identified until 160 years later in 1907. Subsequent vitamin C research by Norman Haworth and Albert Szent-Györgyi saw them receive the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and in Physiology or Medicine respectively.

Oranges remain the fruit most readily associated with this vitamin – despite the fact that several foods supersede them in the vitamin stakes, including Australia’s Kakadu plum, Terminalia ferdinandiana, which boast levels a hundred times higher.

Windows of perception

On that spring night, with the fire feeding all these stories, we people and our dogs settle, quieter, as the big moon rises, its warm orange obscuring so many of the night sky’s other points of light.

It’s still possible to find rich orange out there: one of the most recent pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope shows two actively forming stars, Herbig-Haro 46/47, as a brilliant orange flash amongst the busyness of reds, pinks, blues and the great black blanket of space. These binary stars lie “close by”, as NASA describes it, 1,470 light-years away in the Vela Constellation. They will continue to form for millions of years.

But are these stars’ “rambunctious antics” really orange? James Webb is an infrared observatory – all of the light it detects is beyond light the human eye can see. And so colours are assigned to the different wavelengths when the images are processed. Astrophotographers, researchers and imaging specialists stretch, scale and clean up the data files and apply colour chromatically: blue for the shortest wavelengths; green for the mid-range; red for the longest, with the potential addition of “purple, teal, and orange” if the final image is made up of more than three files of information.

We’re colouring the universe, tinting it to create awe-inspiring pictures. But we’re also using colours to allow our narrow sight to perceive the complexity of the universe, transforming information into brilliant revelation. This palette changes how we understand a mass of mass and energy; it lets us see the universe – literally – in a different light.

The warmest orange, changing what we see and how we see it, as we recognise its glow.