The scientific revolution is usually taken to have begun in Europe approximately in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was based on the idea of empiricism that humans can make progress by concentrating on facts, evidence, and experimental research. Some key people influencing this development were the philosopher and early scientist Francis Bacon, the astronomers Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, and the scientist and philosopher who, among many other things, discovered gravity, Isaac Newton, as well as the philosopher René Descartes. By the year 1700, science had become a broadly accepted concept with many people pursuing it in many fields. Understanding color vision and color perception was also strongly influenced by it, as many investigators began to empirically evaluate the physics and psychology of color experiences.
The visual pathways in eyes and brain were already reasonably well known in the mid-seventeenth century, as investigated and described, for example, by Descartes [1]. He also performed in the first half of the seventeenth-century experiments with light passing through a glass prism and identified the resulting color experiences as those seen in a rainbow. But he was puzzled why the experienced colors differed at different locations in the spectrum. It was Newton who, inspired by Descartes’ writings, performed more quantitative and fundamental experiments and came to understand and interpret the experiences from spectral stimuli and the results of mixtures of such stimuli [2]. His findings are well known to have been very controversial for a long time, but the objective nature of his findings eventually made them accepted.
Another visual phenomenon that was puzzling over many centuries is disk color mixture. It was first mentioned by Ptolemy in the 2nd c. CE. It had been observed on potter’s wheels with differently colored blotches on top that, when the wheel was spun, resulted in a uniform appearance of a single color. It was mentioned again in writing in the early second half of the eighteenth century by the Dutch scientist van Musschenbroek [3] and at the same time used as a practical methodology by the Italian physician and naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli who used the concept as a method to objectively define the apparent colors of birds and insects by matching them with disk mixture using a black, a white, and four chromatic disks (red, yellow, green, and blue) [4]. About 90 years later, it was used in a more refined form by Maxwell as a tool to quantitatively measure color-matching data of multiple people and to derive from them a form of the average spectral functions related to the activity of cones in human eyes.
A key issue before and during the scientific revolution was the systematic ordering of color stimuli and experiences and the apparent relationships between them. Primary colors were addressed by Forsius and d’Aguilon. Descartes, with others like Galilei, Boyle, and Newton, subscribed to the theory of the philosopher David Hume that all sensory perceptions are in the mind and not qualities of objects. Newton’s prismatic experiments and findings were initially so controversial that he did not formally publish them until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Soon thereafter, an anonymous writer introduced in a book on painting a description and illustration of a complete object color hue circle [5]. Color reproduction, based on a black and three chromatic pigments, the precursor of modern color printing, was introduced by Le Blon [6].
Color order was making growing progress with Harris’s two-dimensional color chart, followed by Mayer’s three-dimensional dual-triangular pyramid proposal, practically demonstrated by Lambert’s pyramid, while in the same time period Schiffermüller struggled with the complications of such a system.
In 1777, Palmer, in his book Theory of colour and vision, proposed that humans have three kinds of “fibers” in their eyes that result in color vision, an idea that proved to be true and was restated by Young at the beginning of the nineteenth century [7].
Strong views on color were reported by the German poet and student of color science Goethe who wrote books on the history of color vision and his own views on human color vision, supported in part by his own experimental findings. Goethe opposed Newton in many respects regarding color.
At least half a dozen of the pioneers covered in this chapter did their most important work after “the end” of the scientific revolution, i.e., in the nineteenth century, when science had become a routine activity. They are included in the chapter because they were born in the eighteenth century.
Goethe had worked some 40 years on his Farbenlehre (color theory) and considered it a key effort in his works [8]. It was published in 1810, with an English translation by Charles Eastlake in 1840. The breadth of his knowledge of the historical development of thinking about colors was surprisingly large, beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending in 1794, with the writings of some 70 authors considered in detail.
John Dalton is best known for his work on an atomic theory of chemistry. In regard to color, his main effort was related to color blindness, as the entry shows. He himself suffered from deuteranopia, lacking the M-cone type in his eyes, as an investigation of a preserved eyeball of his showed in 1995 [9]. Given the fact that his brother had the same kind of color blindness indicated to John Dalton, that color blindness was most likely hereditary.
Thomas Young was a polymath educated and active in many fields, elected to be a member of the Royal Society in England when he was 21. He studied for two years at the Göttingen University in Germany where he learned about Mayer’s work on color, likely enhancing his own interest in this subject. He believed in a wave theory of light and related colors and calculated their wavelengths in an inverted scale, based on an estimate of the speed of light.
Philipp Otto Runge was a well-known German painter who became very interested in color order. He was personally acquainted with Goethe with whom he exchanged opinions about color phenomena. He derived his color sphere model from a color triangle based on red, blue, and yellow that he expanded to a hexagon, the intermediate colors being orange, green, and violet, then smoothed it out to a circle and three-dimensionally to a sphere, with middle gray in the center: in a way a predecessor of the Munsell color solid [10].
A story of how practical problems, such as customer complaints about the perceived colors of dyed textiles, resulted in progress and new findings in the color field is that of the French chemist and color scientist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. From 1824 to 1885, he was director of dyeing at Royal Gobelins Manufacturing, a famous tapestry manufacturer founded in the fifteenth century by the Gobelin family in Paris, in 1662 taken over by King Louis XIV and still in operation today. Before assuming that position Chevreul was a chemist specializing in the field of organic chemistry, specifically fats, where he discovered among other things creatine and cholesterol. Based on complaints he received about the optical quality of products at the Gobelins, he started investigations resulting in his stating a law of simultaneous contrast that became of interest to impressionist and post-impressionist painters. His extensive involvement with colors also resulted in hue circle charts, tint/shade scales of the hues, and a three-dimensional semi-spheric color solid [11].
Another example of a scientific intellectual with a broad number of interests and resulting expertise was Jan Evangelista Purkyně who was born in what is today the Czech Republic. He studied originally philosophy but soon became interested in several areas of science such as physiology, pathology of the eye, and psychology, as well as botany. He obtained a degree of medical doctor. His interests in the human eye led him to investigate color perception and its possible basis on activities in the retina. In 1819, he published a book titled “Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht” (Contributions to the knowledge about subjective vision) in which he described many different perceptual phenomena. In 1825, in a new version, dedicated to Goethe whom he had personally met, he described the perceptual effect that became known as the Purkyně effect (pp. 109–110) [12]. But he also wrote a monograph on plant pollen. Among others, he introduced the scientific terms plasma and protoplasma, related to blood. He has a crater on the moon named after him. He is considered by some experts to represent the starting point of neurophysiology.
A different kind of color pioneer was the German philosopher Schopenhauer. As a philosopher, he is best known for his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The world as will and representation). For Schopenhauer, will is the central force behind the world and life, and representation is the form in which we can experience and understand this form and the world. This world view was considered pessimistic because according to it, we cannot learn anything about the true nature and forces operating in the world, i.e., we have no detailed access to will. This view did not find much support during Schopenhauer’s lifetime, but it strongly influenced some later people such as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the composer Richard Wagner. This point of view also influenced his views regarding color. Color became an important subject early in his life because he personally met Goethe and read his works on color. Studying the literature about color of his time in great detail, he wrote his own theory, Űber das Sehn und die Farben (On vision and colors), published in 1816, that was not supported by Goethe [13]. At the end of his life, Schopenhauer was still certain that his views on color were the true ones, thoroughly rejecting those of Newton.
For people born from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the subject of color as well as other sensory experiences began to be better understood in several respects. At the same time, certain new factually based theories remained very controversial, as expressed in the extended criticism received by Newton’s progress in understanding the relationship, for color-normal observers, between light of specific wavelengths and their mixtures and related perceived colors. But much new progress was made in the nineteenth century.