The blackest black, the biggest pumpkin, and the town under one roof

Vantablack is not really a paint. The British firm Surrey NanoSystems grew it as a forest of carbon nanotubes, microscopic tubes of carbon stood on end so densely that light falling into the pile bounces down between them and is absorbed rather than thrown back. In its original form it swallows up to 99.965 percent of visible light, which is why a coated surface looks less like a color than like an absence.[1] The nanotubes are grown at high temperature and break at a touch, so the material behaves nothing like something you could load onto a brush.[1]

The artist Anish Kapoor's studio secured the exclusive right to use the material in art in early 2016, and the reaction had less to do with the black than with the ownership.[2] Painters bristled at the notion that one person could fence off a color. One told the press he had never heard of an artist monopolizing a material, and another said that in the creative world nobody should hold a monopoly.[2]

The reply came from Stuart Semple, a British artist who also makes paint. He mixed what he called the world's pinkest pink, a fierce fluorescent powder, and sold it to anyone at all for a few pounds a pot, with a single exception written into the checkout. To buy it you had to affirm that you were not Anish Kapoor and were not acquiring it on his behalf.[3] Kapoor got hold of some anyway, and answered on Instagram with a photograph of his middle finger dipped to the knuckle in the pink, captioned “Up yours.”[3]

From there it became a genre. Semple kept releasing superlatives open to every artist but Kapoor, and the blacks were the heart of it. Black 2.0 arrived in 2017 as an ordinary matte acrylic that anyone could brush straight from the jar, no laboratory required.[4] Black 3.0 followed after a crowdfunding campaign, claiming to trap 98 to 99 percent of light. Semple argued that to the human eye that was near enough to the real thing, and that the difference was that his came in a bottle you could open at the kitchen table.[5]

The escalation topped out in October 2023 with Black 4.0, which Semple billed as his final superblack and priced at fifty dollars a tube. He claimed it absorbs 99.96 percent of light, close to Vantablack's own headline figure, by roughening its surface so finely that light sinks into it the way it does into velvet.[6] Kapoor remained barred. Semple's shop still sells an ever-growing rack of world's-most-something pigments, glow powders and glitters, several of them carrying the same cheerful clause against a single customer.[7]

What began as a spat has quietly become the most public argument in years about who can own a shade. Pigments have been guarded before, and a particular red or blue has been a trade secret or a royal privilege in its time. The Vantablack fight moved that old question into the age of the licensing deal, and answered it, for one color at least, by handing the color to everyone the exclusive arrangement left out.[2][6]

Nearly every one of these giants is a cousin. They descend from a single bloodline, Dill's Atlantic Giant, bred over decades by Howard Dill on a farm in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Dill protected the seed strain in 1979 and won the sport's early world titles with his own fruit, and growers around the world still plant his lineage.[1] The pedigree of a promising seed is tracked as carefully as a racehorse's.[2][3]

Getting a pumpkin to that size is closer to engineering than to gardening. A serious grower leaves a single fruit on the whole plant and strips off every other flower, so all the sugar a vast canopy of leaves can make pours into one place.[3] The vines are buried as they run to grow extra roots, the soil is fed and its acidity nudged into a narrow band, and a plant may drink well over a hundred gallons of water on a hot day.[5][4] Under its own accelerating weight the fruit flattens against the ground and pales from deep orange toward a waxy, freckled buff.[3]

The record has climbed for decades, and in October 2025 it crossed into new territory. Twin brothers Ian and Stuart Paton, from Lymington in Hampshire, presented a pumpkin nicknamed Muggle that weighed 2,819 pounds, the heaviest ever recorded and the first world title to fall to British growers.[6] It edged past the 2,749-pound Minnesota giant that a horticulture teacher named Travis Gienger had hauled west to win the California championship two years earlier.[7]

The pursuit is governed like a real sport. The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth writes the rules, certifies judges and sanctions weigh-off sites across several continents, so a fruit grown in Oregon and one grown in Hampshire are measured the same way.[8] Its marquee prizes run to tens of thousands of dollars, and the seeds themselves have become a currency. One seed from a former world-record pumpkin sold at auction for £1,250, about two thousand dollars, bought by a seed company betting on its genetics.[9]

The season has one last flourish that keeps the whole thing from taking itself too seriously. When the weighing is done, growers in several countries hollow out their giants, climb inside and race them as boats, a tradition begun on a Nova Scotia lake in 1999 by Howard Dill's own son.[10] A fruit coaxed all summer toward the three-thousand-pound mark ends its year as a paddle craft, a fitting close for a plant almost nobody grows to eat.[3]

The roof in question belongs to Begich Towers, a fourteen-story block the US Army finished in 1957 to house military families.[1] It is a condominium now, and about half of Whittier's 272 residents live inside it, with most of the rest in a couple of buildings nearby.[2][1] Folded into its floors are the things a town keeps in separate buildings elsewhere: the post office, a police station, city offices, a small grocery, a health clinic and a church.[2] The children have a covered route of their own, since the school stands a short walk from the tower and is joined to it by an enclosed passage, so a pupil can go from home to class in a deep Alaskan winter without a coat.[1]

What makes the huddling rational is the way you reach the place at all. For more than fifty years Whittier had no road, and you arrived by boat or by train.[3] Then in 2000 the state opened the old railway bore to cars, and the result is one of the odder pieces of road in North America.[3] The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel runs about two and a half miles straight through a mountain, a single lane wide, shared by highway traffic and the Alaska Railroad on the same strip of pavement, the longest tunnel of its combined kind on the continent.[4]

Because one lane cannot carry two directions and a train at once, the tunnel runs on a clock. Cars go one way for a quarter of an hour, then the other, then a train takes its turn, and at night the whole passage closes, leaving the town sealed off until morning.[5] It was built to survive the country it crosses, rated for winds near 150 miles an hour and temperatures of forty below.[6]

That engineering is not for show. Whittier catches enormous weather off the Gulf of Alaska, better than 260 inches of snow in an average year, and the wind funnels down the surrounding peaks.[1] A town that keeps its post office, its clinic and its children's classrooms indoors, with a locked mountain between itself and the nearest road, is in that light simply being practical.[6][1]

There is a second monument to the same idea across town, and it did not last. The Buckner Building, finished in 1953 and once advertised as a city under one roof in its own right, stands abandoned now, a concrete hulk going back to the weather while the newer tower keeps the town warm.[1]