Who is Indigo Boy?

When I was about 12 years old (1950) I began visiting the Carnegie Library (Hastings Nebraska) with my brother Joe. Joe was a bit more than one year younger than me, but he had already discovered the music room of the library. We would sit in the room and listen to the classical music with earphones. The library had a wonderful collection of 78rpm sets of the best classical music. Here I was introduced to Beethoven, Ravel, Sibelius, Mozart, Back, Bizet and many other composers. This was one of those wonderful experiences that has been a blessing my entire life.
One afternoon after school in the spring of 1951 Joe and I had been listening to Sibelius' 2nd symphony, me for the first time. The "triumph" of the symphony had put me in a very thoughtful mood and I got up and started looking through the book shelves adjoining the music room. I had been interested in Chemistry, as I had put much energy and all the money I could lay my hands on into developing a small lab in the back porch of my parents tiny house. I looked through titles of chemistry books until I came to one called "The Chemistry of Organic Compounds" by James B. Conant. As I thumbed through the book I was taken by the chemical structures on almost every page and the occasional apparatus diagram. On page 510 I came to a discussion of the chemistry of the Natural dye indigo and its synthesis, shown by the reaction sequence above.
I became completely fascinated with indigo, its chemistry according to Conant and proceeded to read all about it. The history of this ancient plant substance is extremely interesting as it is the deep blue dye used by the North African Arabs to dye clothing, and still today is the deep blue dye used to dye denim jeans and is responsible for the characteristic odor of new dark blue jeans. It was an ancient item of Indian commerce which played an important role in Gandhi's freeing of India from British rule as the artificial synthesis of indigo had been used by Britain to "rob" the Indian population of one of its household industries. I wrote a paper for my eight grade English class on the History and Chemistry of Indigo and received a solid A for it from Sister Mathias (Joe and I had the same teacher since the 7th and 8th grades classes were small.)
The structure of indigo was deeply fascinating and I began a study of its analog dyes like tyrian purple. I actually purchased samples of a variety of dyes from many different chemical companies including Tyrian Purple and Chrome Yellow. This led me to eventually study Organic Chemistry in college and eventually obtain a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Vanderbilt University. I learned to do many experiments in Organic Chemistry in my own lab. I did syntheses like aspirin, acetanilide, tribromoaniline, trinitrotoluene and even a small amount of nitroglycerin which started a small fire in the garage in back of the house.
But the more I dealt with the history and chemistry of indigo the more interesting it became. Eventually I saw the possibility of a new type of polymer in the indigo chemistry. That thought led me to a project and a prize the Science Fair in Nebraska of 1957(Westinghouse Science Talent Search). The following post will be a description of that project and its important meaning.