Note 8 — LECTURE I.

Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell reduce all differences of hue to combinations in different proportions of three primary colours. It is demonstrable by experiment that from the red, green, and violet all the other colours of the spectrum may be obtained.

Some years ago Sir Charles Wheatstone drew my attention to a work by Christian Ernst Wünsch, Leipzig 1792, in which the author announces the proposition that there are neither five nor seven, but only three simple colours in white light. Wünsch produced five spectra, with five prisms and five small apertures, and he mixed the colours first in pairs, and afterwards in other ways and proportions. His result is that red is a simple colour incapable of being decomposed; that orange is compounded of intense red and weak green; that yellow is a mixture of intense red and intense green; that green is a simple colour; that blue is compounded of saturated green and saturated violet; that indigo is a mixture of saturated violet and weak green; while violet is a pure simple colour. He also finds that yellow and indigo blue produce white by their mixture. Yellow mixed with bright blue (Hochblau) also produces white, which seems, however, to have a tinge of green, while the pigments of these two colours when mixed always give a more or less beautiful green, Wünsch very emphatically distinguishes the mixture of pigments from that of lights. Speaking of the generation of yellow, he says, 'I say expressly red and green light, because I am speaking about light-colours (Lichtfarben), and not about pigments.' However faulty his theories may be, Wünsch's experiments appear in the main to be precise and conclusive. Nearly ten years subsequently, Young adopted red, green, and violet as the three primary colours, each of them capable of producing three sensations, one of which, however, predominates over the two others. Helmholtz adopts, elucidates, and enriches this notion. (Popular Lectures, p. 249. The paper of Helmholtz on the mixture of colours, translated by myself, is published in the Philosophical Magazine for 1852. Maxwell's memoir on the Theory of Compound Colours is published in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 150, p. 67.)