Exploring Color Photography Fifth Edition, 5th Edition

Color Photography Concepts

Newton’s Light Experiment

From the time of Aristotle, common wisdom held that the purest form of light was white. In 1666 Englishman Isaac Newton debunked this belief by demonstrating that light is the source of color. In an elegantly simple experiment he passed a beam of sunlight through a glass prism, making the rainbow of colors that form the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and the gradations in between). Newton then passed the rainbow back through a second prism, which converted all the hues back into white light (Figure 1.1). From this experiment he determined that color is in the light, not in the glass prism, as had been previously thought, and that what we see as white light ...