R. Shamey, R. G. KuehniPioneers of Color Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30811-1_66

66. Hardy, Arthur Cobb 1895–1977

Renzo Shamey¹

(1)

Color Science and Imaging Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Wilson College of Textiles, Raleigh, NC, USA

Renzo Shamey

Email: rshamey@ncsu.edu

66.1 Hardy Recording Spectrophotometer

References

../images/336076_1_En_66_Chapter/336076_1_En_66_Figa_HTML.png — Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Am, Inst. Physics, 2019

Arthur Cobb Hardy was born on July 24, 1895, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a physicist best known for his work with spectrometers and color analyzers. He co-authored a classic optics book with Fred H. Perrin entitled The Principles of Optics. After WWI Hardy worked at Kodak Research Labs and then transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he became chair of MIT’s physics department, he passed away in 1977.

66.1 Hardy Recording Spectrophotometer

Hardy became the president of the Optical Society of America from 1935 to 36 and in 1935 filed a patent for the first recording spectrophotometer, a device for measuring and recording color values [1]. This device could detect two million different variations in object color and generate a record chart of the results. The patent was assigned to the General Electric Company of Schenectady, N. Y., which sold the first machine on May 24, 1935. It used a photoelectric device to receive light alternately from a sample and from a standard for comparison.

Together with Sherwood F. Brown and duVal Radford Goldthwaite, Hardy invented an Organ in 1931, described as a light piano. An account in “Modern Mechanix” in 1931 describes the device in which beams of light and a photoelectric cell produce completely new sounds based on light [3]. The heart of the “light piano” was a glass disk that had concentric sound tracks recorded into the medium photographically (Fig. 66.1). This disk rotated rapidly in front of a photoelectric cell. Light from a small lamp passed through the sound tracks, thereby generating currents in the photoelectric cell that were then amplified and fed into a loud speaker. The pitch of each note was determined by the number of wavelengths on each sound track.

../images/336076_1_En_66_Chapter/336076_1_En_66_Fig1_HTML.png — Fig. 66.1
Light piano, invented by Goldthwaite and Hardy [2]

As chair of MIT’s physics department, Hardy created the Visibility Laboratory together with Seibert Duntley in 1939. It was focused on applying optics to such problems as camouflage, misdirection of aerial bombardment, target location, and visibility of submerged objects at sea.

In addition, his contributions include a number of articles in scientific journals including the Journal of the Optical Society of America where he discussed topics such as illuminating and viewing conditions for spectrophotometry and colorimetry, the size of a point source, non-intermittent sensitometers, the optical system of the oscillograph, and similar recording instruments, a recording photoelectric color stimulus analyzer, the errors due to the finite size of holes and sample in integrating spheres, the theory of three color reproduction, history of the design of the recording spectrophotometer, an analysis of the original Munsell color system, colorimetry by abridged spectrophotometry, Beer’s law, photoelectric method of preparing printing plates, color correction in color printing, electronic method for solving simultaneous equations, atmospheric limitations on the performance of telescopes, and flux calculations in optical systems, among other topics.

Hardy was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal in Engineering from the Franklin Institute in 1939 for his invention of recording spectrometer and the Frederic Ives Medal in 1957 for distinguished work in optics [3]. He also founded and directed the MIT Color Measurement Laboratory, which gave rise to a noted book, Handbook of Colorimetry in 1950.