Newton’s Disc

Manufacturer	Unknown
Date	ca. 1850
Register	00879

Device designed by Isaac Newton to experiment with the reconstruction of white light from the colours of the visible spectrum. Newton's disc creates the inverse experiment, that is, with the sum of the decomposed colours it creates the colour white. It consisted of a circular piece of cardboard on which stripes had been painted with each of the colours of the rainbow. When this disc is rotated at high speed, the colours mix and become the colour white, due to the visual persistence, which superimposes all the colours on our retina. This device showed that white is composed of the sum of the seven colours of the rainbow.

Tornar