Donation by H. R. Davidson
Hugh R. Davidson is best known for his work in computer color matching and for his educational seminars, but he also has many accomplishments in the areas of instrumental developments for industrial color control, color differences, and color-order spacings.
After graduating from high school in York, PA, Hugh took a year off and toured the far West of the USA returning to the East to attend Lehigh University in the fall of 1937. He graduated from Lehigh in 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and joined the Office of Naval Research for the duration of the War where he was involved in development of automatic gunfire control and targeting for submarines.
Around 1954, he developed the first automatic tristimulus integrator and attached it to the GE-Hardy spectrophotometer. This provided for the first time a quick way of obtaining tristimulus values, which until that time had been obtained by counting squares under a plotted curve.
86.1 Computer Color Matching
With Henry Hemmendinger, at Davidson and Hemmendinger, he painted the first glossy edition of the Munsell Book of Color and supplied it to the Munsell Color Company. There he also developed COMIC, an analog computer, which proved to be the first computer dedicated to making computer-assisted color matches. The COMIC utilized an oscilloscope as a display. On the oscilloscope appeared 16 dots that represented the standard spectral curve to be matched. The pigments to be used were characterized at each of the 16 wavelengths by a plugboard that was inserted in the machine to provide the absorption characteristics of the formula for matching. The user adjusted the concentrations of the ingredients with knobs until a match was achieved, and then, the concentrations were read from the knobs.
Later, the COMIC II accomplished the same task digitally using Kubelka–Munk two-constant theory. A COMIC machine presently resides in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC as an example of a special-purpose computer from the earliest days of electronic computation.
Shortly, after introducing COMIC II, Hugh and Henry published the first paper fully explaining Kubelka–Munk two-constant color-matching theory. This was some eight years before Eugene Allen’s now well-known two-constant paper. Also at Davidson and Hemmendinger, Hugh developed the first color rule that used painted panels to display the series of metamers in the rule. About this time, Hugh undertook, with E. Friele, a very large study of the relative accuracy of the various color-difference equations then in use.
Later on his own at Davidson Colleagues, Hugh developed digital software for computer color matching to run on mini-computers and later personal computers. Hugh developed the pigment plan for and painted the samples of the Optical Society of America’s Uniform Color Scales when an OSA committee chaired by David MacAdam produced that atlas [1]. Hugh has had over 40 papers published in such journals as Journal of the Optical Society of America, American Dyestuff Reporter, Color Engineering, Journal of Chemical Education, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Journal of Coatings Technology, and Color Research and Application [2–6].
From the early 1950’s until around 2001, Hugh held week-long seminars in color education, directed mostly to the subject of computer color matching. He is estimated to have taught 2500 students in this period, and must, therefore, be near the top of the list of color-science educators who have the largest number of student-classroom hours.
In 1966, Hugh won the Bruning Award of the Federation of Societies for Coating Technology. In 1988, he won the Millson Award of the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, and in 1977, the Inter-Society Color Council’s most prestigious award, the Godlove Award. Hugh was made an Honorary Member of the Inter-Society Color Council in 2001.