Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Am. Inst. Physics, 2019
Elliot Quincy Adams was an American scientist born on September 13, 1888. He was the son of Edward Perkins and Etta Medora (Elliot) Adams from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He married Jane J. Pidgeon, and they had a daughter, Dora. According to Gilbert N. Lewis (1875–1946), known for the discovery of the covalent bond and his concept of electron pairs, Lewis dot structures and other contributions to valence bond theory, “the two most profound scientific minds, among the people he had known, were those of E[lliot] Q Adams and Albert Einstein. He also mentioned he would not think Adams would do much publishing.” [1] Adams passed away in Cleveland on March 11, 1971, at the age of 82.
Adams studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked under Gilbert N. Lewis, and in 1909 earned his bachelor’s degree. The two would later team up again during Adam’s Ph.D. studies. Elliot Adams had a scientific career that included government, industrial, and academic settings. After graduation, Adams took a position with the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he worked and published a manuscript with Irving Langmuir, who would later become a Nobel laureate, on problems dealing with heat transfer [2]. In 1912, Adams supplied the simple mathematical formula that is used to describe the conduction–convection loss from an incandescent filament operated in a gaseous atmosphere, and the formula is still used by illumination engineers. In the same year, he moved to Berkeley, California, to continue his higher education at the University of California. In 1914, he earned his Ph.D. on “The Color and Ionization of Crystal-Violet” under the direction of Gilbert N. Lewis [3]. His interest in color remained a dominant theme in much of his later work albeit in a field quite different from his chemical studies. In a 1916 paper, he recognized that α-amino acids occur in neutral solution almost exclusively as dipolar ions (Zwitter ions) [4]. His idea was fundamental to the understanding of the behavior of amino acids and polypeptides.
He became an assistant and an instructor at Berkeley from 1914 to 1917, and during this period, he published papers with Lewis and others. In 1917, Adams moved to Washington, D.C., to perform research in the Color Laboratory in the Department of Agriculture (DOA). Adams’s research in Washington resulted in several patents and journal articles dealing mainly with cyanine dyes as sensitizers for photographic emulsions. He also met Dorothy Nickerson at DOA, and later they developed the Adams–Nickerson (ANLAB) uniform color system in the 1940s. The system is an example of L-a-b color space providing three-dimensional color co-ordinates.
In 1921, his career moved him back to General Electric at Nela Park, Ohio, and he remained there until early 1950s, when he retired. At Nela Park, Adams studied a variety of subjects including “Fireflies, Phosphorus and Other Cold Lights” to “Physics in the Metal Industry” to descriptions of the fluorescent lamp. Adams published over 40 technical papers. Perhaps his most recognized effort was the book, coauthored with W. E. Forsythe, entitled “Fluorescent and Other Gaseous Discharge Lamps” [5].
62.1 ANLAB Model
He published a paper in 1923 in which he discussed a theory of color vision based on Hering and Helmholtz’s models [6]. This was the basis for the subsequent work leading to his AB color space. Based on his research at GE, Adams proposed that amber minus green and green minus blue signals were the outputs of the visual system. His seminal contribution to color science, however, was in his 1942 paper, “X–Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry.” [7] There, he suggested two models for perceptually uniform color spaces. One of the models was termed “chromatic value” which was the precursor of the modern CIELAB uniform color space; the other, called “chromatic valence,” was the direct ancestor of the HunterLab color space, and provided the elements of today’s CIELUV system. He used relatively simple transformations from XYZ of Munsell colors to obtain relatively uniform spacing of hue and chroma. Hunter made use of this approach in his opponent-color concept and obtained direct measures of opponency from the electrical outputs of the photocells in a circuit developed by Wilson of Westinghouse. This led to the direct readout of Hunter’s original alpha–beta chromaticity co-ordinates and, later, to the a-b chromaticity dimensions. Adams also examined the effect of foveal vision on bright and dark surroundings, among other things.
Adams was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, Mineralogical Society of America, and the Illuminating Engineering Society. His hobbies included work with Boy Scouts and the advocacy of Esperanto as an international language [1]. After his retirement from Nela, he worked with an ophthalmologist in the medical school of Case Reserve University, evidently to further knowledge of the physiology of vision. In 1941, he was presented the Silver Beaver Award by the Boy Scouts of America [1].