The first page : The source

This is the history page. You can skip it if you start feel boring after you read the title of page. But you may miss the most valuable part about color. What is color?What is the story telling by color? Do you know anything about history of color naming? All of this might be quite bore but you will surprise with how the story of color begin. Lets me start the story with the easier and shorter way.  

In the 1960s, a worldwide study of colour naming is conducted by anthropologists Berlin and Kay.Many languages only contained two colour terms, they are said is equivalent to white (light) and black (dark). 98 languages studied and the highest number of basic colour terms was to be found in English. They are eleven colors: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, grey and brown.

In the 4th century BC, the great philosopher, Aristotle considered blue and yellow to be the true primary colours, regarding to life’s polarities: sun and moon, male and female, stimulus and sedation, expansion and contraction, out and in. And colours are associated with the four natural elements which are fire, water, earth and air.

After talk about Berlin, Kay and Aristotle, we’ll go to color in healing. Avicenna in the 8th century believed that a person’s physical colouring would indicate that person’s predisposition to various diseases.

When come to the 15th century the famous Swiss doctor, von Hohenheim played a particular importance on the role of colour in healing. He was a contemporary of many famous figures of the Renaissance, such as well known person Copernicus, Martin Luther and Leonardo da Vinci. So his life and learning were conducted in an atmosphere of great transition in thought.

The great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, In 1672, published his first, controversial paper on colour. Forty years later, his work ‘Opticks’ was known to the world. When Newton shone white light through a triangular prism, he found that wavelengths of light refracted at different angles, enabling him to see some separate components – colours. He was able to shine them back through a prism and achieve white light again, but unable to see any further breakdown if he shone a single colour through a prism.

To be continue…