Color Standards and Color Nomenclature: With fifty-three colored plates and eleven hundred and fifteen named colors — John Shaqi
Color Standards and Color Nomenclature: With fifty-three colored plates and eleven hundred and fifteen named colorsRidgway, Robert
Science
Color Standards and Color Nomenclature: With fifty-three colored plates and eleven hundred and fifteen named colors
Ridgway, Robert
Colors
PLAN. —The scientific arrangement of colors in this work is based
essentially on the suggestions of Professor J. H. Pillsbury for a
scheme of color standards,[3] which have also been the basis of several
other efforts toward the same end, as the plates in Milton Bradley's
"Elementary Color" and educational colored papers, Prang's charts of
standard colors, Klinkseick and Valette's "Code des Couleurs," etc.;
but while all these present a scientifically arranged color-scheme and
more or less adequate number of colors they all fail to supply a ready
or convenient means of identifying and designating the colors—the
principal utility of a work of this kind. It is in the latter respect
that the present work is believed to meet, more nearly than any other
at least, this essential requirement, and in this consists whatever
originality may be claimed for it.
The "key" to the classification or arrangement herewith presented is,
of course, the solar spectrum, with its six fundamental colors and
intermediate hues, augmented by the series of hues connecting violet
with red, which the spectrum fails to show. If, with the red-violets
and violet-reds thus added to the spectrum hues, the band forming
this scale be joined end to end a circle is formed in which there is
continuously a gradual change of hue, step by step, from red through
orange-red and red-orange to orange; orange through yellow-orange and
orange-yellow to yellow; yellow through green-yellow and yellow-green
to green; green through blue-green and green-blue to blue; blue through
violet-blue and blue-violet to violet; and violet through red-violet
and violet-red to red—the starting-point—with intermediate connecting
hues. In the solar spectrum, both prismatic and grating, but especially
the former, the spaces between the adjoining distinct colors are very
unequal; therefore for the present purpose an ideal scale must be
constructed, so that an approximately equal number of equally distinct
connecting hues shall be shown. Distinctions of hue appreciable to the
normal eye are so very numerous[4] that the criterion of convenience
or practicability must determine the number of segments into which the
ideal chromatic scale or circle may be divided in order to best serve
the purpose in view. Careful experiment seems to have demonstrated
that thirty-six is the practicable limit, and accordingly that number
has been adopted.[5] If the number of intermediate hues were equal
in all cases there would, in this scheme, be five between each two
adjacent fundamental colors of the spectrum; but a greater number of
recognizably distinct hues is obviously necessary in some cases than in
others; for example, spectrum orange is decidedly nearer in hue to red
than to yellow, and therefore the number of intermediates required on
each side of the orange is different, being in the proportion of four
for the red-orange series to five for the orange-yellow, and similarly
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