If you're outside right now, somewhere near a street, pause for a moment and take a look

around.

Notice the street signs, people walking, the cars passing by.

Now for a moment, imagine nothing is as it looks now.

Instead, the street signs are, let's say, a drab gray.

And everyone that you see is wearing only neon lime green.

The tires on the cars, they're kind of soft, milky white.

The, all of this, the gray street signs, the lime clad pedestrians, it's all basically

just a fun thought experiment, except for the milky tires.

Because it turns out that this is actually what they look like and did look like until

the early 20th century.

Because this is the color of rubber, before it's painted and deliberately coated in pounds

and pounds of what's called carbon black.

There's a moment in everyone's life when they realize that every single thing around

them has been designed in some way, you know, every light switch, every cable, everything

that seems trivial has been designed in some way.

And you realize the color is a very, very deliberate part of our everyday living experience, whether

we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not.

But when you understand that, suddenly you look at things in a very, very different way.

I'm Dylan Therese and this is Atlas Obscura.

A daily celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're heading to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we'll hear from the keeper of the Forbes

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