Dispersion of white light and theory of colour
Descomposición de la luz blanca y teoría del color
- Date
- 1666 · confidence high
- Place
- Woolsthorpe and Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Isaac Newton
- People
- 👤 Isaac Newton1642–1727
- Field
- Communication
What was discovered
A prism splits white light into a spectrum of colours that a second prism cannot decompose further and that can be recombined into white. It shows that colour is a property of light, not a modification of white.
Communicated to the Royal Society in 1672; developed in 'Opticks' (1704).
What it led to
- Spectroscopy
- Theory of chromatic aberration and achromatic lenses
- Corpuscular theory of light
- Colorimetry
Built on
- Snell's law of refraction1621
- Dispersion of light in the prism (Marci's Thaumantias)1648
- Prism experiments by Marci and Descartes
Made possible
- Colours of thin films and Newton's rings1665-1704
- Newtonian reflecting telescope1668
- First scientific description of colour blindness (Dalton)1794-1798
- Discovery of Infrared Radiation1800
- Trichromatic theory of colour vision (Young)1802
- Rayleigh scattering and the blue sky1871
- Spectroscope
- Achromatic lenses (Dollond)