The Color Spectrum

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was the first to make a systematic study of color.

By passing a narrow beam of sunlight through a triangular-shaped glass prism, Newton showed that sunlight is composed of a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow.

Newton called this spread of colors a spectrum and noted that the colors were formed in the order red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violets.

White light

Sunlight is an example of what is called white light. White light is a combination of all the colors. Under white light, white objects appear white and colored objects appear in their individual colors.

Newton showed that the colors in the spectrum were a property not of the prism but of white light itself. He demonstrated this when he recombined the colors with a second prism to produce white light again. In other words, all the colors, one atop the other, combine to produce white light. Strictly speaking, white is not a color but a combination of all colors.