Colour vision : $b Being the Tyndall Lectures delivered in 1894 at the Royal InstitutionAbney, William de Wiveleslie, Sir
Science
Colour vision : $b Being the Tyndall Lectures delivered in 1894 at the Royal Institution
Abney, William de Wiveleslie, Sir
Color vision
I must now introduce to your notice a different method of experimenting
with colour vision. If we throw the whole spectrum on the screen, and
ask a person with normal vision to point out the brightest part, he
will indicate the yellow, whilst a red-blind will say the green, and
so on. This tells us that the various types of colour blind must see
their spectrum colours with luminosity differing from that of the
normal eye. The difference can be measured by causing both to express
their sense of the brightness of the different parts of the spectrum
in terms of white light, or of one another. Brightness and luminosity
are here used synonymously. On the two small screens are a red and a
green patch of monochromatic light--a look at the green shows that it
is much brighter than the red. Rotating sectors, the apertures of which
can be opened or closed at pleasure during rotation, are now placed in
the path of the green ray. The apertures are made fairly small, and the
green is now evidently dimmer than the red. When they are well open
the green is once more brighter. Evidently at some time during the
closing of the apertures there is one position in which the red and
green must be of the same brightness, since the green passes through
the stage of being too light to that of being too dark. By gradually
diminishing the range of the “too open” to “too closed” apertures we
arrive at the aperture where the two colours appear equally bright. The
two patches will cease to wink at the operator, if we may use such an
unscientific expression, when equality in brightness is established.
This operation of equalising luminosities must be carried out quickly
and without concentrated thought, for if an observer stops to _think_,
a fancied equality of brightness may exist, which other properly
carried out observations will show to be inexact. Now, instead of
using two colours, we can throw on a white surface a white patch from
the reflected beam, and a patch of the colour coming through the slit
alongside and touching it. The white is evidently the brighter, and so
the sectors are placed in this beam. The luminosity of (say) a red ray
is first measured, and the white is found to require a certain sector
aperture to secure a balance in brightness. We then place another
spectrum colour in the place of the first, and measure off in degrees
the brightness of this colour in terms of white light, and we proceed
similarly for the others. Now how are we to prove that the measures
for luminosity of the different colours are correct? Let us place three
slits in the spectrum, and by altering the aperture of the slits make
a mixture of the three rays so as to form white. The intensity of this
white we can match with the white of the reflected beam. We can then
measure the brightness (luminosity) of the three colours separately,
and if our measures are correct there is _primâ facie_ reason to
suppose that they will together make up the brightness of the white.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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