Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton (1642-1726) and a series of experiments that he publishes in 1672. He is the first to understand the rainbow — he refracts white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
In the late 1660s, Newton starts experimenting with his ’celebrated phenomenon of colors.’ At the time, people thought that color was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms colored light. Hooke was a proponent of this theory of color, and had a scale that went from brilliant red, which was pure white light with the least amount of darkness added, to dull blue, the last step before black, which was the complete extinction of light by darkness. Newton realizes this theory was false.