Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
Around 1670 Newton spent a couple of years working in colour managment. Although technology has moved on since then there are a number of important issues which we still need to be reminded of:
1. No light, no colour.
I might add more instances of this nature, but I shall conclude with this general one, that the colours of all natural bodies have no other origin than this, that they are variously qualified to reflect one sort of light in greater plenty then another. And this I have experimented in a dark room by illuminating those bodies with uncompounded light of diverse colours. For by that means any body may be made to appear of any colour. They have there no appropriate colour, but ever appear of the colour of the light cast upon them, but yet with this difference, that they are most brisk and vivid in the light of their own daylight colour.
So, 340 years later, why is it we still have to explain why the colours on a proof look different under different lighting conditions?
2. White light is composed of a spectrum of colours. Working with prisms and lenses Newton could see that white light could be separated into coloured rays and that the order of the colours and their angles of refraction indicated some kind of intrinsic property. But we'd have to wait until the 19th Century when the concept of "rays" was replaced with "waves" before the significance of the spectrum was fully understood.
Newton was also curious about the nature of human vision -- so curious that he experimented on himself by staring at the sun or by pushing wooden needles into his eye sockets...
Newton is infamous among scanner operators because he invented Newton's Rings -- rainbow patterns that appear on your scans if you try and dry mount transparencies on the scanner drum.
