reblogging Ben Katchor:
from A. F. Ward’s Universal System of Semaphoric Color Signals, 1862
“A Novel and Original Invention, by which 46,656 words or sentences can be represented with six colors, intended as A Medium of Communication between all Nations, and Applicable to any Language; also adapted to sound and night signals, by which communications may be made at all-seasons, without regard to weather.”
via benkatchor
Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel included “musical notes correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color theory had become increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of temperaments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1789 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,” the Public Domain Review notes, including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four temperaments of humoral theory.
via Open Culture
“The first of Lye’s ‘direct films’ to receive a public screening. Promoted by Sidney Bernstein’s Granada chain of cinemas, it eventually came to be seen “by a larger public than any experimental film before it, and most since” (as the film historian David Curtis has pointed out). Its soundtrack is a beguine – a dance popular in France during the 1930s. A Colour Box won a Medal of Honour at the 1935 International Cinema Festival in Brussels. Having no suitable category in which to award the film, the jury simply invented a new one.”
“As its title suggests, A Colour Box was also notable for being a colour film. Lye used the process of Dufaycolor at a time when colour film was still in an experimental phase. This gave the film a novelty value when first shown. A Colour Box eventually secured quite a wide theatrical release and became popular with both general audiences and critics. Because it was colourful and dynamic, with a catchy musical score, it was more accessible than many abstract films of the period.”
see also
![Richard Waller Tabula colorum physiologica … [Table of physiological colors] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1686](https://library.si.edu/sites/default/files/39088018207936-1000.jpg)
“This table is one of the earliest known color charts. Waller created it as a tool for describing plants and animals. Collectors and scientists could compare their specimens to this table and use the names provided to identify the colors of leaves, bark, flowers, feathers, plants, and animals.”
“In a mixture of primary colours, the quantity and quality of each being given, to know the colour of the compound.”
from wiki – Throughout Opticks, Newton compared colours in the spectrum to a run of musical notes. To this purpose, he used a Dorian mode, similar to a white-note scale on the piano, starting at D. He divided his colour wheel in musical proportions round the circumference, in the arcs from DE to CD. Each segment was given a spectral colour, starting from red at DE, through orange, yellow, green, blew [sic], indigo, to violet in CD. (The colours are commonly known as ROY G BIV.)
The middle of the colours—their ‘centres of gravity’—are shown by p, q, r, s, t, u, and x. The centre of the circle, at O, was presumed to be white. Newton went on to describe how a non-spectral colour, such as z, could be described by its distance from O and the corresponding spectral colour, Y.
Paul Greer 