The Color Wheel Was Invented by Isaac Newton

Before Isaac Newton's groundbreaking work in the 1660s, the common understanding of color, which had persisted for over 2,000 years, was that colors were formed by a mixture of light and darkness. Newton challenged this notion through a series of ingenious experiments. In a darkened room, he allowed a single beam of sunlight to pass through a glass prism. The result was the projection of a rainbow-like band of colors onto the wall, the familiar spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This demonstrated that the colors were not created by the prism, but were inherent components of the white light itself. To prove his point, he used a second prism to collect the scattered colors and recombine them back into a beam of white light.

To organize his findings, Newton transformed this linear spectrum into a circular diagram, which became the first color wheel. By connecting the two ends of the spectrum, red and violet, he created a visual system that illustrated the relationships between different hues. Interestingly, Newton's decision to identify seven distinct colors was not purely based on visual observation. He was influenced by the ancient Greek belief in a correspondence between colors and the seven notes of a musical scale. He mapped the color segments to the intervals of a musical scale, which is why the sections for each color in his original diagram are of unequal size. This unique intersection of science, music, and mathematics laid the foundation for all future color theory.