Image from Notable New Yorkers of 1896–1899: a companion volume to King’s handbook of New York City (1899) by Moses King
Ogden Nicholas Rood was an American physicist, best known for his work in color theory. He was a descendant of Scottish immigrants arriving in America in the seventeenth century and was born on February 3, 1831, in Danbury, CT. His father was an ordained minister [1].
Rood graduated from Princeton College. He continued his postgraduate studies at Yale College and then moved to Berlin and Munich (Germany) to continue his pursuit of physics, while also following watercolor painting as an amateur, which was an interest that he practiced throughout his life. Rood was active in several fields of investigation among which were optics, photography, and color. His first appointment was as a professor of chemistry at Troy University in Troy, NY. In 1863, Rood was appointed as a professor of physics at Columbia College in the city of New York, a position he held until the end of his life. He eventually held positions as Chair of Physics at Columbia University and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During his lifetime, he published over 50 articles in scientific journals about half of which were on optics and color. He performed many kinds of experiments concerning color, the purpose of which was to clarify the understanding of color effects and interactions resulting in meaningful quantitative data. Rood died on November 12, 1902, in New York [2].
41.1 Modern Chromatics and Other Contributions
Complementary colors (solid circle) and the contrast effect on them (dashed circle) when juxtaposing them with a red sample [1]
Rood’s descriptions, together with those of Maxwell and Chevreul, had an influence on impressionist artists and their successors. Rood’s theory of contrasting colors was particularly influential. George-Pierre Seurat, the founder of neo-impressionism and the foremost pointillist, and Camille Pissarro are known to have been influenced by Rood in their paintings. In his book, Rood discussed the difference between additive and subtractive color stimulus mixture and the effect of additive stimulus mixture when viewed at a distance, resulting in the terms chromo-luminarism and pointillism. Rood suggested that small dots or lines of different colors, when viewed from a distance, would blend into a new color. He believed that the complementary colors of his color wheel, when applied in pairs by the artist, would enhance the presence of a painting. The book, in its various editions, became broadly influential as a scientifically based but easy to comprehend, up-to-date text on color science at the time. Albert H. Munsell reported that he also studied Rood’s book when he was a 21-year-old art student and the book first appeared. Munsell obtained a positive response from Rood on his color sphere when the two met in 1899.
Clearly, Rood’s interest in colors encompassed both the scientific and artistic points of view and these provided him with ideas to develop a systematic order of colors. In addition to a double cone system with black and white on either tip, Rood produced a color circle, on the basis of experiments using rotating disks, a given color point placed precisely opposite to its complementary partner.
The Smithsonian’s first curator of birds, Robert Ridgway, was one of America’s best-known scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a well-known figure in the fields of taxonomics and color study. He created the most important and painstaking color dictionary at the time, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, which he self-published in 1912. Ridgway named four colors for Rood which were Rood’s Blue, Rood’s Brown, Rood’s Lavender, and Rood’s Violet [3].