MAXWELL ON THE RELATIONS OF COLOURS

MAXWELL, JAMES CLARK.

On the Theory of Compound Colours, and the Relations of the Colours of the Spectrum.

(London, Taylor and Francis, 1860). 8vo. In the original printed wrappers. In "Proceedings of the Royal Society", Vol. X [10], No. 39. Entire issue offered. Wrappers with a few brown spots, fine and clean. Pp. 404-408. [Entire issue: Pp. 319-494].

First printing of Maxwell's paper on a method of exhibiting the relations of colours.

"Maxwell worked on the generation of white light by mixing different colors and in 1860, published the paper On the Theory of Compound Colours and its Relations to the Colours of the. In this paper, he extended the work of Thomas Young who first postulated only three colors, red, green and violet are necessary to produce any color including white and not all the colors of the spectrum are necessary as first illustrated by Newton. He also incorporated Hermann G?nther Grassman's concept that there are three variables of color vision (spectral color, intensity of illumination and the degree of saturation). Maxwell showed that these color variables can be represented on a color diagram based on three primary colors. While Newton distinguished his principal colors from the painters triad of primary colors (red, yellow and blue), he supposed the identity of mixing rule for lights and pigments. Even though Helmholtz explained that the mixture of color lights is an additive process while the mixture of pigments is a subtractive process as illustrated in Figure 2, Maxwell made experiments and developed a complete theory to explain how this happens by creating a color triangle which was originally suggested by James David Forbes and illustrated that any color can be generated with a mixture of any three primary colors and that a normal eye has three sorts of receptors as illustrated in his 1861 paper On the Theory of Three Primary Colours. He chose the three primary colors as red, green, and blue." (Sarkar, Pp. 4-5).

From 1855 to 1872, Maxwell published at intervals a series of valuable investigations concerning the perception of colour, colour-blindness and colour theory, for the earlier of which the Royal Society awarded him the Rumford Medal. The instruments which he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient to use. For example, Maxwell's discs were used to compare a variable mixture of three primary colours with a sample colour by observing the spinning "colour top.".

Order-nr.: 47992