In some employments color blindness in an employee would be fatal to many lives. Engineers and pilots govern the direction and speed of trains and boats largely by the colored signals which flash out in the night's darkness or move in the day's bright light, and any mistake in the reading of color signals would imperil the lives of travelers. For this reason a rigid test in color is given to all persons seeking such employment, and the ability to match ribbons and yarns of all ordinary hues is an unvarying requirement for efficiency. CHAPTER XIV HEAT AND LIGHT AS COMPANIONS "The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun." 136. Most bodies which glow and give out light are hot; the stove which glows with a warm red is hot and fiery; smoldering wood is black and lifeless; glowing coals are far hotter than black ones. The stained-glass window softens and mellows the bright light of the sun, but it also shuts out some of the warmth of the sun's rays; the shady side of the street spares our eyes the intense glare of the sun, but may chill us by the absence of heat. Our illumination, whether it be oil lamp or gas jet or electric light, carries with it heat; indeed, so much heat that we refrain from making a light on a warm summer's night because of the heat which it unavoidably furnishes. 137. Red a Warm Color. We have seen that heat and light usually go hand in hand. In summer we lower the shades and close the blinds in order to keep the house cool, because the exclusion of light means the exclusion of some heat; in winter we open the blinds and raise the shades in order that the sun may stream into the room and flood it with light and warmth. The heat of the sun and the light of the sun seem boon companions. We can show that when light passes through a prism and is refracted, forming a spectrum, as in Section 127, it is accompanied by heat. If we hold a sensitive thermometer in the violet end of the spectrum so that the violet rays fall upon the bulb, the reading of the mercury will be practically the same as when the thermometer is held in any dark part of the room; if, however, the thermometer is slowly moved toward the red end of the spectrum, a change occurs and the mercury rises slowly but steadily, showing that heat rays are present at the red end of the spectrum. This agrees with the popular notion, formed independently of science, which calls the reds the warm colors. Every one of us associates red with warmth; in the summer red is rarely worn, it looks hot; but in winter red is one of the most pleasing colors because of the sense of warmth and cheer it brings. _All light rays are accompanied by a small amount of heat, but the red rays carry the most._