Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles, 3rd Edition

5

Orderly Arrangements of Color

Studies indicate that humans with normal color vision can distinguish among some 2 million different color percepts when viewed against a midgray background. The question of how to place these perceptions into an orderly and meaningful arrangement has been of interest for more than 2000 years. An opinion that proved influential until the seventeenth century was that of Aristotle (1984). He believed colors to be generated from the interaction of darkness and light, and that there are seven simple colors out of which all others are obtained by mixture. The true meaning of the seven color names is not certain in all cases, and translations vary (see Chapter 10). They may have been: white (pure light), yellow, red, purple, green, blue, and black (pure darkness).

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton demonstrated that a narrow beam of sunlight refracted with the help of a prism forms in a dark room a band of light that we experience, when reflected from a white surface, as having several different colors. Newton, who was not only the preeminent scientist of his time but also an alchemist believing in universal harmony chose, in analogy to musical tones of an octave, to recognize seven hues in the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (ROYG BIV). But Newton's choice of seven was controversial for the next 200 ...