When were blue glow sticks available?

May 7, 2024 8:48 PM

This came up in conversation and we had mismatched memories and could not look up the answer later. I remember blue glow sticks being special and new in the mid nineties. He remembers them available earlier alongside the other colors.

My primary exposure to glow sticks as a kid was at my town summer festival concert thing on 4th of July weekend where they sold both the bendy thin kind you could snap into a necklace as well as the thicker kind that glowed more brightly, to go along with the fireworks and carnival they had each night. I seem to recall in the earlier years there only being green, yellow, and pink glow sticks, maybe red or orange too, and some time in the late 90s they started having blue, white, and purple which was very exciting for me because blue and purple are my two favorite colors. My nerdy scientist older brother explained that they hadn’t been able to make blue before on the cheap because they hadn’t quite figured out the chemicals needed for a lasting blue glow, and the white and purple were byproducts of that because of how colors of light work.

My companion does not have such specific memories but he does claim to remember blue glow sticks growing up in a Chicago suburb in the late eighties, but he could easily just be misremembering.

The issue comes with our inability to find much of anything about the times when different glow stick colors were invented and mass manufactured for commercial use, instead of just a military and safety rescue thing. Were there always blue glow sticks and my town festival was simply bad at having all the colors and my brother made up a logical seeming lie?

Super bonus points if you can tell me when all the different colors of glow sticks became commonly available.

posted by Mizu to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

From following Wikipedia links, blue glow sticks use 9,10-Diphenylanthracene and a bit more digging reveals that "chemiluminescence was first reported by E.A. Chandross in 1963 as a result of the reaction between oxalyl chloride and hydrogen peroxide in the presence of 9,10-diphenylanthracene (DPA)".

So blue chemiluminescence was known about 30 or so years before you first encountered it, which means most likely blue glow sticks were available before the mid-90s.

Also, the father of the glow stick, Edwin A Chandross - the same E.A. Chandross noted above - used Luminol for his first experiments. If you've ever watched CSI, that's the stuff they spray on crime scenes and then use a black light to look for blood stains. So the very first glow stick experiments produced a blue light (although they weren't commercially available at that point).

Here's a list of patents if you want to follow the technical improvements and changes to Chandross' original discoveries.

None of which is a direct or definitive answer to your question. That eluded my weak Google-Fu, sadly. But if no-one else can find the answer for you at least that's some info to dig into.
posted by underclocked at 11:11 PM on May 7

Is it possible your brother isn’t lying, exactly, but conflating glow stick colors with LED colors? It’s the kind of thing I might do entirely by accident.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:58 PM on May 7 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Oh it’s totally possible he was conflating it with something else or making an incorrect but educated guess. It also really doesn’t matter to me if he was just making it up to seem smart or whatever; our family does that all the time and it’s no big deal. It’s just a part of my hazy memory that helped me date it to the mid-to-late nineties, since he was at least home for the summer or still in high school, so the blue glow sticks for 4th of July happened between 94-99. Please disregard the question of if he was lying or not, that’s just rhetorical. The real question is when did blue (or I guess cyan, I am a color theory nerd after all) glow sticks become something affordable and common in the USA for parties and events?
posted by Mizu at 1:09 AM on May 8

There's a very good chance the vendors at the festival would have ordered their glow stuff from Oriental Trading Company. If you can find an archive of old catalogs, you might find your answer in there.
posted by griseus at 7:49 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

Edmund Scientific used to have glow sticks in their catalogs, if that gives you a direction to look!
posted by limeonaire at 8:13 AM on May 8

I have memories (and this is the type of thing I remember!) Glow sticks first came in that chartreuse greenish-yellow color, quite similar to that of fireflies, or lightning bugs; which makes sense, as the insects' light-emitting reaction is what had been duplicated, in the lab. (In fact I went to school with kids who claimed that they'd turned lightning bugs in to a laboratory somewhere, or their parents did, to further this research.) Later these glow sticks dropped in price, lasted longer, and came in a new shape: long, flexible tubes marketed as 'lanyards' (I first saw these in blue, purple and green at Disneyland, late 1980s.) Another memory: on late-night maneuvers in Fort Hood, early 1990s, I remember seeing things marked with regular greenish glow sticks, but the military also had red ones, which seemed very special, at the time. Now they seem available in a yellowish color, as well. But I remember the blue from 'way back. It's not a bright blue, unlike the LED.
posted by Rash at 9:30 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

Rambo III came out in 1988 and had blue glowsticks.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 9:40 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]