© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
R. Shamey, R. G. KuehniPioneers of Color Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30811-1_65

65. Godlove, Isaac Hahn 1892–1954

Renzo Shamey1   and Rolf G. Kuehni1  
(1)
Color Science and Imaging Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Wilson College of Textiles, Raleigh, NC, USA
 
 
Renzo Shamey (Corresponding author)
Email: rshamey@ncsu.edu
 
Rolf G. Kuehni
Email: rolf_kuehni@ncsu.edu
65.1 Munsell Neutral Value Scale
References
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colorantshistory.org

Isaac Hahn Godlove was born on June 13, 1892, in St. Louis, MO to Louis and Lillie Godlove. His father was a photographer working for the J. C. Strauss Studio in St. Louis. I. H. Godlove, one of the four children, studied at Washington University of St. Louis where he received a B.S. degree in 1914 and an M.A. degree a year later. At the University of Illinois, he received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1926. For the next four years, he served as a director of the Munsell Research Laboratory, supervising the production of the color chips for the 1929 Munsell Book of Color. In 1923, Godlove married Esther Alice Hurlbut with whom he had a son, Terry Francis. Between 1932 and 1935, Godlove operated his own color consultant service. In 1935, he joined E. I. du Pont de Nemours in Wilmington, DE as a physico-chemist. In 1943, he joined General Aniline and Film Corp. in Easton, PA where he remained until his early passing on August 14, 1954.

One of his hobbies was the history of color in the history of humans. He wrote a book text, “The earliest peoples and their colors,” on the subject but died before it got published. It is now available as a digital text on the Web site of the Inter-Society Color Council (www.​iscc.​org). As his son reported: “His interests were wide, his intellect keen, and he was most generous in sharing his wide knowledge of the physics and chemistry of color with those who sought his help… .” After his death, his second wife, Margaret Noss, established the ISCC Godlove Award in his memory, an award that is considered the highest honor given by the ISCC.

Godlove was on the Board of Trustees of the Munsell Color Foundation from its foundation in 1942 until his death. He was an active member of the Optical Society of America, the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, and the Archeological Society of America. At OSA, he was for an extended period of time a member of its Colorimetry Committee and one of the authors of its report “The Science of Color (1953).” He was an active member of the Inter-Society Color Council for many years and its chairman in 1948–49 [1].

65.1 Munsell Neutral Value Scale

Godlove’s initial involvement with color was at the Munsell Research Laboratory where, under the guidance of I. G. Priest at the National Bureau of Standards, efforts were underway to standardize the color samples of the Munsell color atlas and to expand their number so that it could be used as a reliable color reference system. The number of hues in the early versions of the atlas was limited to ten, with the resulting number of color samples being less than 200. In the 1929 enlarged edition, the number of hues was doubled to 20 requiring the generation of many new samples by disk mixture, matching their appearance with painted samples and measuring their reflectance to standardize their production. A related important article Godlove co-authored with A. E. O. Munsell and L. L. Sloan, published in 1933, was “Neutral value scales: Munsell neutral value scale (Fig. 65.1) [2].” This and other efforts eventually resulted ultimately in the cube root version of the CIE L* lightness scale.
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Fig. 65.1

Graph from Ref. [2] showing the results for six observers in experimentally scaling a value scale of gray samples

The measurement of color stimuli, their specification, and the calculation of small color differences became his specialty in the color field. Another field of interest was fluorescent colors. Many brief articles on various aspects of color he authored can be found in the Inter-Society Color Council Newsletters of the period. Over his lifetime, he authored and co-authored 47 articles on a wide range of color subjects, usually of a practical nature. Three examples of articles published in the Journal of the Optical Society are as follows:
  1. a.

    1934: Comparison of Cobb’s and Munsell Research Lab data on neutral value scales and equations describing them.

     
  2. b.

    1938: Some problems and methods of dyestuffs automatic spectrophotometry.

     
  3. c.

    1951: Color change from daylight to night light, calculated and observed.

     

Godlove was a contributor to the textbook The science of color, by the Colorimetry Committee of the Optical Society of America, published originally in 1953.