Description
Joseph Williams Lovibond began developing the tintometer in the 1870s as a means to check the quality and consistency of the beer produced in his family’s breweries by comparing its colour to a standard scale. From his experiments, Lovibond developed and patented his Series 52 scale of brown glass, which remains the industry standard in the U.S. for the production of beer, whiskey, honey, and other brown liquids. Growing interest from a wide range of industries eventually led Lovibond to diversify the tintometer’s palette, allowing users to combine more than 200 graduated hues of red, yellow, and blue to make a target colour for their product that could then be compared to a sample specimen using the instrument’s viewer.

The tintometer also found uses beyond industry. In 1890 the Royal Society Committee on Colour Vision used the instrument to investigate colour blindness, leading them to recommend new safe standards for the use of colour signals in the maritime and railway industries. And in 1898 anthropologists from the University of Cambridge took a Lovibond tintometer to the Torres Strait in the Pacific, where they used it to test the colour vision of Melanesian islanders, as well as to accurately record their skin colour.
27/05/2015
Created by: Joshua Nall on 27/05/2015