Who Created the Color Wheel?
For centuries, people believed that all colors were a mixture of black and white. How did we learn otherwise?
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Transcript
For millennia, it was believed that all colours were a mixture of black and white, a theory posited by Aristotle.
It was the English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton who brought a more scientific understanding of colour theory.
He conducted an experiment in which he placed a prism in front of a beam of sunlight and showed that white light was actually made of a range of hues.
He identified seven visible colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet and organized them into a wheel, as seen in his 1704 book Opticks.
Newton was not the first to arrange colours in a circle.
In the early 1600s Finnish astronomer Aron Sigfrid Forsius created a diagram in which he ordered colours by how dark or light they were.
However, he included only red, yellow, green, blue, and gray.
It was Newton who introduced the first iteration of the modern colour wheel.
After the publication of Newton’s Opticks, other scientists, artists, and writers such as English entomologist Moses Harris and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe developed colour wheels of their own.
Some theorists organized colours in more unconventional shapes.
English artist Mary Gartside produced not only a “colour circle” but also abstract blots that broke down previously designed colour wheels into harmonizing and contrasting hues.
The colour wheel was developed through centuries of exploration.
Its different iterations have continued to show the interactions between colours, providing a valuable tool for artists to this day.
It was the English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton who brought a more scientific understanding of colour theory.
He conducted an experiment in which he placed a prism in front of a beam of sunlight and showed that white light was actually made of a range of hues.
He identified seven visible colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet and organized them into a wheel, as seen in his 1704 book Opticks.
Newton was not the first to arrange colours in a circle.
In the early 1600s Finnish astronomer Aron Sigfrid Forsius created a diagram in which he ordered colours by how dark or light they were.
However, he included only red, yellow, green, blue, and gray.
It was Newton who introduced the first iteration of the modern colour wheel.
After the publication of Newton’s Opticks, other scientists, artists, and writers such as English entomologist Moses Harris and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe developed colour wheels of their own.
Some theorists organized colours in more unconventional shapes.
English artist Mary Gartside produced not only a “colour circle” but also abstract blots that broke down previously designed colour wheels into harmonizing and contrasting hues.
The colour wheel was developed through centuries of exploration.
Its different iterations have continued to show the interactions between colours, providing a valuable tool for artists to this day.