Color Theories and the Inter-Society Color Council

H. P. Gage

Thanks to intensified study of color by scientists of the National Bureau of Standards, of the Agricultural Marketing Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, of the Committees of the American Association of Railways, glass manufacturers, dye manufacturers, paint and ink manufacturers, the American Pharmaceutical Association, and photographic manufacturers and the stimulation of the motion picture industry, the theories of color have been put in shape and tied together with extensive data on the color vision of many observers so that a workable engineering evaluation of colors, a scientific system of naming them, and practical means of producing them to exact specification is now available and is ripe for presentation not only to learned societies but to the general public. — Colored lights are subject to spectrophotometric measurement and by means of the ICI (International Commission on Illumination) data can be interpreted in terms of luminosity and the x and y coórdinates (or map) defining chromaticity. — In these terms are being defined the color limits for railway signal colors, also all standard Atlases of Color such as the Maertz & Paul Dictionary of Color, the Munsell Book of Color, and, it is hoped, the next standard set of colors of the Color Card Association of the U. S. used by all manufacturers of clothing and other things in which standardization of manufacture in spite of rapid changing styles is an economic necessity. — The next edition of the Pharmacopoeia and of the National Formulary, sponsored by the American Pharmaceutical Association, will use the system of color names developed and recommended by the Inter-Society Color Council in coöperation with the National Bureau of Standards to describe the normal appearance of all drugs and chemicals. A shorthand method of describing the spectrophotometric analysis of color filters for theater spot and floodlights in the form of a seven digit number has been devised for commercial specification of this material. — The Inter-Society Color Council is made up of 74 delegates appointed by 11 member societies, and 67 individual members. It functions as a joint committee on color of the member societies favored with advice of the individual members. The Council issues News Letters in mimeograph form to its members. They contain information of progress in color work, notices of important color publications, the activities of the Color Council and notices of its planned meetings. The Council sponsors meetings with the member societies on the subject of color. Such joint meetings have been held with the Optical Society of America, the Technical Association of the Pulp & Paper Industry (T. A. P. P. I.), and the American Psychological Association. A joint technical session on color will be held at the annual convention of the Illuminating Engineering Society this fall and also with the American Society for Testing Materials at its 1941 spring meeting to be held in Washington.

Print ISSN
Published
1940-10
Content type
Original Research
DOI
10.5594/J10038