Nowadays, if you want to identify any shade of color, it's easy.
Even when it comes down to the slight differences between a sage flower and a lavender purple hue,
there are mobile apps, websites, and the old store catalogs that make it simple for you.
But this wasn't always the case.
It took a long journey to reach this level of understanding of color theory
and to nail down the recipes for the exact color outputs.
Let's track this evolution through five key individuals.
Some of the earliest color circular diagrams can be dated back to the early 1600s.
They were used to visualize simple rules when it came to color relationships and mixtures.
A key figure in this area was Finnish-born astronomer Aron Sigfrid Forsius.
Through his studies, he concluded that colors could be placed in a special order.
His system contained five main median colors:
red, yellow, green, blue, and grey.
These colors were then graded as either being closer to black or closer to white.
By illustrating this, Forsius constructed the first drawn color system.
In 1686, Richard Waller published an article titled,
"A Catalogue of Simple and Mixed Colors with a Specimen of Each Color Prefix to Its Proper Name."
Accompanying the article was this color chart.
The simple matrix was designed to illustrate swatches of 21 simple colors,
alongside examples of mixed pigments that would result from various combinations of the simple colors.
At around the same time, Sir Isaac Newton was developing his own approach
to displaying the relationships between colors.
The most famous part of these experiments was probably those completed using a prism.
In a dark room, Newton placed a prism in front of a thin beam of light, creating a rainbow of colors.
This proved that white light was in fact composed of many colors.
Developing this idea further, Newton took the violet end of the spectrum
and connected it to the red starting point, creating the first color wheel.
Newton's color wheel was widely used and became a core tool in theorizing
how colors can blend to create other colors.
In the late 18th century, Tobias Mayer took a different approach,
instead focusing on triangles to organize color.
First, he placed the three pure colors: red, yellow, and blue.
At the three points of the triangle, then he filled in the rest of the triangle with progressive gradients of the pure colors.
Mayer's original triangle included 12 steps between colors.
This is the maximum degree of variance he believed the human eye could distinguish,
however, theorists would later bring this down to 7 steps.
Philip Otto Runge developed Newton's ideas further by creating a three-dimensional model in the form of the sphere.
The aim of Runge's work was to show the harmony between colors.
The color sphere places the pure colors red, yellow, and blue around the equator.
Three mixed colors follow in each of the equal intermediate spaces between the primaries,
with white and black forming the sphere's poles.
His approach of arranging colors based on their hue and value was revolutionary at that time.
However, placed side by side, it's hard to miss the similarities between Runge's sphere and Forsius's early work.
So the next time you're trying to decide what shade of purple you might want to paint your bedroom
or the shade of blue that will go on your company's new brochure,
remember these great individuals that made it possible for us to have all these choices at our fingertips.
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