Introduction: Colors, Natural and Synthetic, in the Ancient World
Color is important. It gives life to everything people do, think, and even say. In the days when color television sets were expensive, and the corner bar was in sole possession of one, the neighborhood center became the corner bar. Color sensation is a un
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Introduction: Colors, Natural and Synthetic, in the Ancient World
1.1 Introduction Color is important. It gives life to everything people do, think, and even say. In the days when color television sets were expensive, and the corner bar was in sole possession of one, the neighborhood center became the corner bar. Color sensation is a universal human experience. From the beginning of recorded history, references to color abound in connection with every aspect of human life. Color is an integral part of poetry, descriptive narratives, and technical treatises. It is a phenomenon that everyone appreciates; a ‘‘colorless’’ world composed only of blacks, whites, and grays, like that old television set, is difficult to imagine today. Color is also a property of materials that has been an integral part of human experience in every age and civilization. It has caused humans to wonder about its origin [1] and to experiment in its production. In fact, manipulation of colored pigments is perhaps one of the oldest applications of what is now called chemistry. Color is a subject that sprawls across the four enormous disciplines of physics, chemistry, physiology and psychology. Any attempt to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the word involves a dip into each of these disciplines and into the areas that overlap them. Furthermore, the word color can be applied to not only the visual arts, but also to the worlds of law, music, dance, verbal expression, and personality traits. The American Heritage Dictionary [2] defines color in eighteen different ways, and devotes a half-page article to explaining the definitions of color names used elsewhere in the dictionary. Through its very title, this work will narrow down this vast subject to chemistry, and specifically to chemistry as seen through the lens of history, although it will be necessary from time to time to allude to color’s profound relationship to the other disciplines named above. The impact of light and color on society, scientific theory, and human self-understanding will be explored by fleshing out the history of color from the chemical point of view, beginning with the first recorded uses of color down to the development of our modern chemical industry, looking at some theoretical physics along the way. We will see that color pervades every aspect of
M. V. Orna, The Chemical History of Color, SpringerBriefs in History of Chemistry, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32642-4_1, Ó The Author(s) 2013
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1 Introduction
our lives, our consciousness, our perceptions, our useful appliances and tools, our playthings, our entertainment, our health, our diagnostic apparatus—all based in no small part on chemistry.
1.2 Working Definition and Nature of Color Although the ordinary observer takes color largely for granted, it is a very complex phenomenon involving the physics of a light source, the chemistry of the colored object which modifies the light falling upon it, and the psychophysical response of the observer to the resulting stimulus. There can be no color, therefore, withou
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