Accession No
4421
Brief Description
Maxwell’s colour wheel, by Newton and Company, English, late 19th Century
Origin
England; London; 3 Fleet Street
Maker
Newton and Company
Class
demonstration
Earliest Date
1875
Latest Date
1900
Inscription Date
Material
wood (mahogany); metal (iron); rope (string); paper
Dimensions
length 253mm; breadth 153mm; height 409mm
Special Collection
Provenance
Purchased in Christie’s Nicholas Webster Collection sale, 26/09/1991, lot 131.
Inscription
‘NEWTON & CO.
OPTICIANS
TO THE QUEEN
3, FLEET STREET,
LONDON’ (plaque on base)
Description Notes
Mahogany base, cast iron frame screwed to base. Wheel with varnished wooden handle turns a string attached to a cog, to turn a shaft to which is attached a paper circle. The paper has the spectrum of colours printed on it and when spun appears white.
Condition: good (paper poor); complete.
References
Events
Description
This colourful wheel turns white when it spins. Because the wheel is spinning quickly, it tricks your brain into seeing all the colours at once.
If you adjust the colours on the wheel, you change the colour you see when it spins. This is because human eyes can only sense the blue, green and red wavelengths in visible light. Your brain receives these signals and interprets the combination of the three.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) and his wife Katherine used a colour wheel like this to quantify the proportions of red, blue, and green in any colour. Clerk Maxwell used this principle to invent the first colour photograph. It’s also behind how colour TV and screens work.
22/07/2024
Created by: Hannah Price on 22/07/2024
Description
The design of this device was originally devised by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), first head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, to test colour perception. When the wheel is rapidly rotated, the eye sees a colour resulting from the mixture of the different colours arranged on the wheel.
Created by: [Label from Assembling Bodies exh: http://maa.cam.ac.uk/assemblingbodies/exhibition/measurement/capacities/87/ ]
FM:44182
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