Full Spectrum by Adam Rogers

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

Yet another book that was just sitting there on the new books display that I couldn’t resist picking up. 

 

Full Spectrum is a book that combines multiple areas of study, from history and anthropology to physics and anatomy. Color, after all, isn’t a “real” thing as such, but the creation of our own brains. It is our interpretation of our sensing of electromagnetic radiation of a narrow range of wavelengths. Furthermore, our sensors do not even pick up all the colors we see, but combine the three main (“primary”) wavelength ranges we detect into an extrapolation of the other colors that exist, but are not directly sensed. 

 

Which is why humans can mix red and green light, and see yellow. 

 

In this book, Adam Rogers looks at our understanding of color as it relates to the human technologies of reproducing it. Thus, the paleolithic cave paintings are the start. We know for sure that the basic earth tones - ochres - as well as black and white were well known to the ancients. 

 

Admittedly, it is possible that they used other paint colors too, but these would have faded with time. Or, maybe they didn’t know how to make the other colors in paint. Either way, the ability to create permanent greens and blues in particular came later in human history. 

 

Thus, the book looks at how these additional color technologies went hand in hand with our scientific understanding of what color was, how we sense it, and how we could better utilize it. 

 

As this basic summary indicates, this is a bit of an offbeat book, one that wanders down some fascinating alleyways, and one that ends up in some unexpected places. After all, everything tends to connect to everything else at some point, and following the connections is part of the fun. 

 

Thus, the book moves from the ancient artwork to the ceramics trade - and competition between China and Abbasids. It contains a chapter on Lead White - for centuries the gold, er, maybe the lead standard for white pigments, despite its toxicity. There is a chapter on the Chicago World’s Fair and the relationship of white as a color to racial “whiteness,” among other things. There is a detailed history of the discovery of Titanium and its eventual ubiquity as the far safer replacement of lead in making everything white. Eventually, it gets to the way that screens and color technology can make us “see” colors that do not actually exist, allowing for new artistic techniques. And, of course, there is a chapter on “The Dress,” that internet phenomenon that ended up sparking a whole area of scientific inquiry into color perception. In fact, the article that went viral about the dress was written by none other than Adam Rogers.  

 

As one might expect from an author who writes for Wired, the book has a modern feel to it, with a bit of snark, and a casual feel to the writing that belies the extensive research that went into the book - including the 32 pages of citations, long bibliography, and index. Make no mistake, this book has very high informational content, but it also has a lot of Rogers’ personality in it as well. 

 

Here are some highlights. 

 

Between the world of everything outside your skull and the thoughtful aspic inside it are sensors, biological marvels studding the outside of your body that, in ways both understood and not so much, take input from that outside world of subatomic particles and turn it into impulses that your think-meat can use to create a sensible impression of the world. 

 

That term, “thoughtful aspic” is brilliant, in my opinion. 

 

Rogers does have a bit of a bone to pick with the education he received, particularly the “Western-centric” paradigm which glorified Western thinkers, while mostly ignoring every other civilization. This was apparent in how most of us learn about the history of science and math. So, the book talks about Aristotle and his mostly wrong conception of color - although he did get close to the truth about how rainbows formed - and his belief that colors couldn’t mix. 

 

Yet Aristotle’s vision of the world stuck. Writing four hundred years later, Pliny argued that it was somehow indecent to introduce new colors and pigments. Plutarch was explicit in his derision for color mixing, suggesting that the Homeric world for dyeing actually meant “tainting” and that mixed pigments were not pure and virginal. 

 

I could write at length about how this basic concept is bound up with the way of thinking that resists all change, and brutally punishes anyone who disproves the rigid categories proclaimed by the priests. Just as Aristotle couldn’t imagine colors mixing, his heirs decided that the fact that the do in fact mix was somehow immoral. There is definitely a similarity in the historical Western approach to gender, to name just one area. But knowledge didn’t stop with the ancients. 

 

History used to take a little break right here. The next beat in the eternally swelling rhythm of white-man progress usually falls on Isaac Newton, who blows a rainbow out of a prism, figures out how colored light works, and invents physics. But that isn’t the way it happened. Over the next few hundred years, someone had to sort out the mess Aristotle had made of light, pigment, and rainbows. That dawning awareness refracts through Cairo and Baghdad.

 

This is exactly how science is taught, isn’t it? Likewise, we tend to hear about the ancient Greeks and their math - Archimedes and Pythagorus, and so on. And then we get Newton and Leibniz and calculus. But what happened in the middle? Well, a hell of a lot - literally most of what you learn in pre-college math, that’s what. From the development of zero as a placeholder, probably in India, to the crowning achievement of the Islamic world, Algebra. 

 

Less snarky but a lot of fun was Rogers’ description of spending time at the Louvre looking extremely closely at paintings, and the ways of suggesting three dimensions. He eventually stopped being able to see the shapes at all, and decided to clear his head by looking at a three dimensional object without much color - “I settled on early-twentieth-century cocktail glasses.” 

 

When Rogers gets to Newton, he notes that we may have the Bubonic Plague to thank for his breakthroughs in color physics. After all, Cambridge canceled all classes in 1665 due to the plague, so he had nothing better to do than conduct experiments by himself. 

 

Rogers also takes aim at sexism throughout the book, in particular the idea that “form” is superior to “color” - a bit of a truism in art for many centuries, and the way that color has been associated with femininity. From the early church father Jerome, who whined about makeup - “They serve only to inflame young men’s passions, to stimulate lust, and to indicate an unchaste mind” - to the renaissance artists who ignored and indeed buried the fact that all of those Greek statues were once brilliantly painted in full color. Not that one is needed, but this is a reminder that the old men who wrote most of western christian theology had a huge misogyny problem. 

 

Speaking of issues of political import, in giving the history of lead paint, Rogers describes the Victorian Era fight to regulate toxic industries. The lead mills were targeted by Dickens, and Dr. Thomas Oliver served on the commission that eventually started regulating workplace hazards in England. 

 

Not that he was exactly a paragon of virtue, though. His first goal was to outlaw women working in the lead mills, on the grounds that lead poisoning hurt fertility. (It does, but for men too…) 

 

Oliver eventually lobbied successfully for laws that banned women from the work, which both helped fix the problem and is exactly the kind of sexism that keeps women from being as well employed and well compensated as men - the invention of occupational health as a practice was aimed more at the health of women’s potential babies than the women themselves. 

 

Needless to say, then as now, the people who profited from pollution fought every single regulation, blaming supposedly careless workers rather than their own dangerous workplaces. Also, the United States was far behind the rest of the first world in banning lead paint. Europe mostly did before World War One, while we waited until the 1970s. 

 

Rogers later turns to the history of color printing, which is quite fascinating. One name that stands out is Jacob Le Blon, who developed the first practical three-color printing process. Few of his illustrations - mostly for science books - exist, but Rogers does mention one on displayed, of a dissected penis, done for a textbook written by William Cockburn. 

 

“In case you were worried that the history of color would fail to involve a dick pic and immature jokes, I have you covered.” 

 

In the middle of the discussion of the World Fair, and the contemporary association of whiteness with purity and goodness, Rogers notes the involvement of renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. (I highly recommend A Clearing in the Distance by Witold Rybczynski for more about Olmsted.) The designer of Central Park did not like the plan for those all-white buildings, and said so. And took some action of his own. 

 

He quietly urged his gardener to add more trees and foliage - the classic move of the passive-aggressive landscape architect who doesn’t like a building. 

 

There are plenty of rabbit holes like this that the book follows. Another is the question of the extent to which language dictates thought. This truism isn’t as true as its proponents claim, particularly since the question of which came first, the language or the idea, is a sticky wicket anyway. Because color is fairly objective at one level (frequencies of light are measurable), it has been used to test this idea. And, as the book shows, it has mostly created more questions than answers. It seems that trying to test this is devilishly difficult, and the elimination of bias pretty much impossible. But it makes for an interesting thought experiment. One thing that does seem to hold true is that men and women - on average - do experience color slightly differently, particularly when it comes to greens and blues. 

 

Men and women almost certainly perceive the colors in the grue region the same, but they describe them differently. This is the region of colorspace that launched a million arguments over whether this shirt goes with these pants.

 

I can attest to that. 

 

I also enjoyed a bit from the conclusion of the book, wherein the author describes a woo device he saw in Paris called the Bioptron - a thing that claims to cure medical issues with polarized light. 

 

The Bioptron has no side effects, the website claims, which doesn’t surprise me, because it seems unlikely that it has any effect effects, either. 

 

I will end with the ending sentence. Rogers writes mostly stuff for magazines, not books, so he has mastered the art of the pithy sentence.

 

Light bounces off a surface and into electrified meat and jelly mounted in the bony skull of our great-to-the-nth-grandparents, and they see what we would’ve seen: glorious color that lets the human mind observe and become a part of the universe at play.