Colour and Colour Vision in Late Nineteenth Century British Sciences

This thesis employs a close reading of archival and published sources to explore the origins of colour vision science in 19th century Britain. By drawing attention to wide ranging dialogues and disagreements between diverse figures with different visions of colour, including physicists David Brewster, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Rayleigh, politician and philologist William Gladstone, ophthalmologists Frederick Edridge-Green and Robert Carter, and anthropologist W.H.R Rivers, I show that 19th century colour vision science was not narrowly confined to the quantification, measurement, and classification of colours. It was instead shaped by deeper metaphysical questions and wider political concerns. These questions and concerns included the implications of natural law, free-will, and materialism for scientific understandings of reality, the limits of Darwinian understandings of humanity, the legitimacy of scientific experts and institutions in determining public policy, and the history, future, and advancement of civilization. I argue that the widespread use of spinning discs as an experimental research technology, promoted by Brewster and Maxwell, combined with the mainstream acceptance of Maxwell’s theoretical model of ‘coterminal response curves’, generated conflicts between competing understandings of perception, vision, and colour in the second half of the 19th century. These conflicts stemmed from the establishment of new conventions, inspired by Maxwell’s work, which held that scientists should maintain a practical and analytical distance from their own visual experiences, that the visual experiences of test subjects should be treated as untrustworthy phenomena in need of further analysis, and that the meaning of subjective experiences are contained within, and revealed by, mathematical models that accord with a rational understanding of the physical world. These practical and metaphysical approaches to the meaning of human experience did not end with the conflicts they generated in the second half of the 19th century but continue to bear on broader contemporary understandings of truth and illusion in scientific practice and popular imagination.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Bridgman, Gregory

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Staley, Richard

• 1890 Committee on Colour Vision
• 19th Century Science
• Colour
• Colour Perception
• Colour Vision
• Co-terminal Response Curves
• David Brewster
• Frederick Edridge-Green
• Goethe
• History of Anthropology
• History of Physics
• History of Science
• James Maxwell
• Philosophy of Colour
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Physics
• Philosophy of Science
• Psychical Research
• Psychology of Colour
• Psychology of Perception
• Rayleigh
• Royal Society Committee on Colour Vision
• Sciences of Illusion
• Society for Psychical Research
• Thomas Young
• Torres Strait
• Torres Strait Expedition
• Trichromacy
• W.H.R. Rivers
• William Gladstone
• William Halse Rivers
• Young-Helmholtz theory of trichromatic colour vision
• Spinning Discs
• Colour Discs
• James David Forbes
• James Forbes

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.93617

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/346196