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The Color Spectrum, Newton > 
This circular diagram became the model for many color systems of the 18th and 19th centuries. Claude Boutet’s painter’s circle of 1708 was probably the first to be based on Newton’s.
Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton (1642-1726) with a series of experiments that he published in 1672. He was the first to understand the rainbow — he refracted white with a prism, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
In the late 1660s, Newton started experimenting with his 'celebrated phenomenon of colours’. At the time, people thought that color was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms colored light. Hooke was a proponent of this theory of color, and had a scale that went from brilliant red, which was pure white light with the least amount of darkness added, to dull blue, the last step before black, which was the complete extinction of light by darkness. Newton realized this was false.
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