Newton’s discoveries revolutionized our understanding of the most common aspects of nature such as light. Prisms were seen as trivial toys used for fun in laboratories until Newton came across them. He conducted a series of experiments with sunlight and prisms after getting a prism at a fair in 1664.
Newton made the astonishing discovery that clear white light was composed of seven visible colours. The visible spectrum, the seven colours of the rainbow, was scientifically established by Newton. This discovery opened new vistas in optics, physics, chemistry, and the study of the colours in nature.
One bright sunny day, Newton darkened his room and made a hole in his window shutter, allowing just one beam of sunlight to enter the room. He then took a glass prism and placed it in the sunbeam. The result was a spectacular multi-coloured band of light just like a rainbow.
Newton believed that all the colours he saw were in the sunlight shining into his room. He thought he then should be able to combine the colours of the spectrum and make the light white again. To test this, he placed another prism upside-down in front of the first prism. He was right. The band of colours combined again into white sunlight. Newton was the first to prove that white light is made up of all the colours that we can see.
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