The Colors of Light and the Color Spectrum, Part 1

Through Isaac Newton’s fascination with the behavior of sunlight passing through a prism, we can today understand the colors of light.

He set up an experiment in 1666, using a hole in a window shade to admit a ray of daylight into a darkened room, where a glass prism was placed so that the ray would pass through it.

On doing this, the ray of light was refracted (bent) on travelling through the prism and emerged as a spreading beam of multicolored light, the colors of the rainbow and in the same order, were seen on the white wall beyond.

Newton's experiment with light through a prism.

From these observations of light emerging from a prism Newton concluded that white sunlight was a mixture of different types of light, with each being of a single pure color and that each color was refracted (bent) at different degrees, violet by the most and red by the least.

Picture Above - Newton's experiment showing a ray of light traveling through a prism, being refracted and emerging as a spreading beam of multi colored light.

Picture Above - The Electromagnetic Spectrum

These colors he identified as Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. Each hue is today thought to correspond to a portion of the range of wavelengths of radiant energy that can be distinguished by the human eye, what we can see is called the visible spectrum. This is only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which ranges from high energy x - rays to low energy radio waves. At either end of this visible spectrum is white and black. White we now know from Newton reflects and contains all the other colors within it, and black absorbs all the light.

The Colors of Light and the Color Spectrum, Part 2


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