Chromatlas

Person

Isaac Newton

He split white light with a prism, added indigo to the rainbow to match music, and drew a color wheel.

Lived
1643–1727
First paper
On light and colors, 1672
Opticks
1704, in English

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) is famous for gravity, but his first public triumph was color. In 1666 he noticed that sunlight passed through a prism spread into a band of colors longer than it was wide: the prism bent each color by a different amount. White light, he concluded, isn't pure; it's a mixture of all the spectral colors, and each color is a property of the light itself.

His 1672 paper on light and colors, his first, set off a bitter fight with Robert Hooke. Newton held back his full account until after Hooke died in 1703, then published Opticks in 1704, in English rather than Latin. In it he named seven colors, adding orange and indigo to the five he had counted before, so the spectrum would match the seven notes of a musical scale.

He also joined the two ends of the spectrum into a circle, one of the first color wheels, and showed that mixing red and violet light gives a red-purple found in no rainbow (colors that aren't in the rainbow). He insisted color is a sensation in the mind, not a thing in objects. Because glass lenses split colors and blurred telescope images, he built the first working reflecting telescope, which uses a mirror instead.

His theory overturned the old view, inherited from Aristotle, that colors are light mixed with darkness. Not everyone gave in: Goethe spent decades attacking Newton in his Theory of Colours. A century later Thomas Young showed light behaves as a wave, and Maxwell made color mixing a measurable science.

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