NEWTON, Isaac. Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. The Third Edition, Corrected.

Introducing the Colour Wheel

NEWTON, Isaac. Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. The Third Edition, Corrected. London: [William Bowyer for] William and John Innys. 1721.

8vo. Contemporary panelled calf, gilt black morocco lettering-piece to spine, raised bands; pp. [8], 382, [2 (advertisements)]; 12 folding copper-engraved plates; woodcut initials, head-, and tailpieces; a few small white marks to boards, raised bands rubbed, upper hinge tender; endpapers browned and coming loose, a few small spots and dampstains, edges of plates browned and chipped where untrimmed; otherwise a very good copy; contemporary ownership inscription ‘Cor. Grogan’ to front free endpaper, occasional marginal pencil marks.

Third edition, the last to be published in Newton’s lifetime, of Opticks, a work which ‘did for light what Newton’s Principia had done for gravitation’ (Babson), containing the first published depiction of a colour wheel, devised by Newton in 1666.

Based on the text of the 1717 second edition, with a few minor revisions, this was the last version of Opticks to be published before Newton’s death in 1727, although he did approve the text of the fourth edition, which would not be published until 1730. Unlike Newton’s other great work, Principia Mathematica (1687), Opticks is based on experimentation and empirical observation and is written in English, making it a major contribution to vernacular scientific publishing and an early model of popular scientific writing. Although Newton did publish a Latin edition intended for scholars in 1706, two years after the first edition, all subsequent editions were in English.

What is truly revolutionary is Newton’s overturning of the assumption of ‘all previous philosophers and mathematicians [...] that white light is pure and simple, regarding colours as modifications or qualifications of the white’ (PMM). Through experiment, Newton showed that all light is in fact made up of the spectrum of seven colours. His use of prisms to split light into its constituent hues showed that colour arises from a physical property of light, each colour being mathematically definable by the angle through which it is refracted. He also posited the theory that light is ‘corpuscular’, that is, composed of particles. So contentious was this theory that, after Newton first presented his findings to the Royal Society in the 1670s it was broadly disparaged, especially by Robert Hooke. Newton’s bitter rival had his own theory that light is a simple wave and that a prism, rather than merely sorting light into its constituent colours, materially changes light to produce colour. Hooke had his supporters, while philosophers in Britain and on the Continent continued to defend the Aristotelian theory of colour as a mixture of light and dark. It was only after further years of experimentation and the death of Hooke in 1703 that Newton felt emboldened to make his work public.

The impact of Opticks is hard to overestimate. The book fundamentally changed how we understand light and colour, leading to modern approaches in art as well as in manufacturing, technology and science. Newton’s colour wheel has become a standard tool in understanding different shades; the rainbow is both explicable scientifically and potent metaphorically. His conception of light as a particle became accepted to such a degree that it actually held back early quantum theory, when scientists couldn’t explain that light also seemed to act as a wave. Yet his own analysis of so-called Newton’s rings, in which an interference pattern occurs between a spherical surface and flat surface because different wavelengths of light interfere at different thicknesses of the air layer between the two surfaces, hinted at the wave-particle duality that underlies modern quantum mechanics.

As in the second edition, the two papers on curvilinear figures, in which Newton proved his priority over Leibniz in the invention of calculus and which he added to the first edition, are omitted ‘as not belonging to the Subject’ (Advertisement II). However, the thirty-one speculative Queries are present in slightly expanded form, including the famous last query in which he explores interparticle attraction, positing the first notion of forces that act on particles as gravity works at a planetary scale and thus opening, almost as an afterthought, a whole new branch of scientific inquiry.

Two variants were printed by William Bowyer for William and John Innys in 1721, this one with the headpiece on p. 1 depicting a man with a globe (as opposed to Cupid, as in ESTC T18662), and p. 192, line 14 ends ‘24’ as opposed to ‘about’; the setting of the text evidently converges from quire O onwards. Gray calls for the first plate of Book III to be bound at p. 264, but in our copy it is bound at p. 218, the start of Book III.

ESTC T131541; Babson 135; Gray, pp. 36–37; cf. PMM 172.

SKU: 2126433