To Truly Understand a Rainbow

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Newton was an unpopular, solitary, brilliant college student. At that time, he was not yet the famous scientist known for his great discoveries.

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He bought a prism at the annual market near his college and liked it so much that he promptly bought another, even though he had very little money.

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The Great Plague was a serious bubonic plague outbreak in London in 1664-1665. It killed an estimated 100,000 people, almost a quarter of London’s population, in eighteen months.

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He retreated to his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor, a large stone house surrounded by apple orchards.

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Aristotle’s view was that white light was one simple, uniform, and solid thing. This was an incorrect historical theory that scholars accepted for a long time.

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Hooke believed colour was a mixture of light and darkness. He made a colour scale from bright red to soft blue and then black. This was another incorrect theory.

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Newton noticed that a white page with black writing does not appear coloured when viewed from a distance. It blends into grey, so he felt that their ideas did not explain colour correctly.

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He placed the prism in his upstairs study, twenty-two feet from the window, and let a narrow beam of sunlight pass through it.