Where the light shines diamonds ·· Prussian Blue part II

before talking about the science, i'd like to present another meaning of Prussian Blue. this is what it means to me. it represents God looking down and trying to figure out how to fix the situation where the people he created are inadvertently hurting and killing each other. it represents that moment where life moves beyond the earth.

But most of all, it represents something to me that I witnessed.

It reminds me of Lublin. And it reminds me of her hand. The one that held mine, the right one because the left one was missing. The photo I am referring to is the one from the Imperial War Museum in london, uk.

It reminds me most of the damage that was done to those we loved. Many people who endured exposure to the things that occurred before Prussian Blue formed endured unspeakable things. Many of them actually lived. So when you think about Prussian Blue, you might think about genocide or methods of killing used by the Nazis. But the truth is, many people lived.

So how does Prussian Blue form? At a very basic level, something called HCN (Hydrogen Cyanide) comes in contact with a material like clay, stone, concrete, wool, cotton, fiber, etc. Zyklon B released HCN gas. Depending on the weather, a blue layer begins to form. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It depends on the environment.

Prussian Blue (and there are thousands of different shades of blue we are talking about) forms when HCN is present. The folks that lived were only exposed to a certain amount in the air. If you were to count polygons, triangles, or squares floating through the air between two points in time, you could count them and determine how many would actually be harmful to a person or animal. This is called parts per million.

Now on to the original definition of Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue is a dark blue powder that people use to make paint, dye clothes, and even help sick people. As I mentioned above, it forms from a chemical reaction when HCN comes in contact with a certain type of surface, and there are many.

HCN was used extensively in insect repellent back in the old days. It is outdated for bugs and pests around the home. There are safer alternatives that were invented many years ago. So back in the early 1900's, it was discovered that it could be used for killing ant piles, etc. They then figured out how to use it in outdoor settings to get rid of insects such as within wildlife environments and in the countryside.

This stuff has been around several hundred years. It's not rocket science. The chemical patterns are well understood both from a geometric and a spectral perspective.

Zyklon-B is merely HCN and some organic material in a fire extinguisher canister. [as shown in historical photographs I have seen] They then sprayed it over clothes to clean them of insects.

So you might be asking, where was it used?

During the 1940's, the camps across Nazi occupied Poland and Europe did not have air-conditioned barracks and clean conditions. They were really messy. Places like Bergen-Belsen were extremely dirty with people sleeping on the ground. This is where Zyklon-B fits in. It was used to clean people's clothes initially.

It was commonly used to kill lice at Westerbork.

© 2026 Bryan R. Hinton. I wrote this. All rights reserved. All original text, photographs, and processed imagery published here, including hyperspectral reconstructions, abundance maps, classification maps, anomaly maps, and any other algorithmically derived visualizations, are the intellectual property of Bryan R. Hinton. The underlying spectral data, latent representations, and intermediate pipeline outputs are likewise reserved. Archival documents reproduced on the site (e.g. scans held by the Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, or other public repositories) remain in the public domain or under their original licensing; only the accompanying captions, commentary, and any derivative analysis are © Bryan R. Hinton. No portion of the copyrighted material above may be reproduced, redistributed, modified, displayed, or used to train, fine tune, or evaluate machine learning models without prior written permission. Brief quotation for the purposes of criticism, scholarship, or review is permitted under standard fair use principles, provided attribution is given.