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William Albert Hugh Rushton was a British neurophysiologist who made important contributions to our understanding of color vision and perception. He is perhaps best known now for his development of the principle of univariance.
Rushton was born in London on December 12, 1901. He entered Cambridge University as a medical student in 1921 and obtained a degree in physiology in 1925. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1928 working under Prof. E.D. Adrian for his research investigating the flow of current in and around nerves to determine the portion of the current responsible for excitation. As a result of this work, he won the Stokes Studentship at Pembroke College in 1929. He spent two years at the Johnson Foundation in Philadelphia before returning to a Research Fellowship at Cambridge University. He went to University College Hospital in 1931 to study clinical medicine before obtaining a lectureship at Cambridge University in 1935 after which he produced a prodigious body of work; he published 37 papers on nerves with four colleagues over 25 years and 147 papers on vision with 27 colleagues over a period of 30 years. Upon retirement, he spent some time at Florida State University as a Distinguished Research Professor. He was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1970 and continued to publish articles until he died in 1980. He passed away on June 21, 1980, in Cambridge, England, and is buried at the Trinity College Chapel.
72.1 Nervous Excitation and Principle of Univariance
Rushton laid the groundwork for the establishment of the modern theory of nervous excitation and propagation by his quantitative analysis of the temporal and spatial factors involved in electrical excitation [1, 2].
He developed techniques to measure the visual receptors in vivo and made important contributions regarding the distribution of receptors in the retina, the action spectrum of bleaching, and the spectral characteristics of bleaching [3–5].
By 1955, Rushton had evidence of visual receptors at the fovea in normal and color-blind subjects. He obtained evidence of two receptors in the medium-long wavelength spectrum in color normals and demonstrated that protanopes and deuteranopes were each lacking one of these [6, 7].
In the early 1960s, Rushton developed an analytic anomaloscope to study color vision. Using this instrument, observers would match a pure spectral light with an additive mixture of red and green in variable proportions [8].
Rushton published two papers in Scientific American and gave several notable didactic lectures. In a review lecture at the Physiological Society (London), he described the principle of univariance that “the output of a receptor depends upon its quantum catch but not upon which quanta are caught.” Many of the laws of color mixing are a direct consequence of this principle. He also reintroduced the cone-forming color triangle, first put forward by Maxwell, as an alternative to the usual representation of color space developed by the CIE [9].