Person

James Clerk Maxwell

He measured color with spinning tops, then showed the first three-color photograph: a tartan ribbon, in 1861.

Lived: 1831–1879
Color photograph: Tartan ribbon, 17 May 1861
Color paper: Experiments on Colour, 1855

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) is best known for showing that light is an electromagnetic wave. Before that, as a young man in Edinburgh, he turned color into measurement. Using spinning tops with adjustable sectors of colored paper, which blur into a single color as they spin (optical mixing), he matched mixtures by eye and recorded the proportions, showing that colors can be added like numbers.

His 1855 paper 'Experiments on Colour' backed Thomas Young's idea that the eye has three kinds of color receptor (trichromacy). He plotted mixtures on a triangle with red, green and blue at the corners, an ancestor of the color charts scientists still use, and he tested color-blind observers to see which mixtures they confused (see color blindness).

In 1855 he also proposed photographing a scene three times, through red, green and blue filters, and projecting the three images on top of each other. On 17 May 1861, at the Royal Institution in London, he showed the result: a tartan ribbon photographed by Thomas Sutton. The plates were barely sensitive to red, so it was rough, but every color camera and screen since uses the same three-color idea.

The Royal Society gave him its Rumford Medal in 1860 for his work on color. By 1865 his equations showed light to be an electromagnetic wave, which made the visible spectrum one narrow band in a far wider range that includes radio waves.

Swatches

Red · filter 1 (1861) #D62F2F
Green · filter 2 (1861) #2E9A4F
Blue-violet · filter 3 (1861) #2563C9

Colors

Sources

Maxwell, J. C. (1855). Experiments on colour, as perceived by the eye, with remarks on colour-blindness. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 21: 275–298.
James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. The first colour photographic image.
Wikipedia, 'James Clerk Maxwell'.

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