Kaleidoscopic colour top

John Gorham’s Colour Top

Paul Smith University of Warwick

Colour Materiality

1858

The Kaleidoscopic Colour Top patented by Tonbridge GP John Gorham in 1858 testifies to the enthusiasm for Chevreul generated by the Great Exhibition. It was mentioned in a review of the 1859 Spanton translation of The Laws of the Contrast of Colour in The Builder. And the magazine’s comment in an article on the device itself – ‘Mr. Gorham’s top and Routledge’s edition of “Chevreul” may be usefully studied together’ – was (mis)quoted on its instruction leaflet.

An example of Gorham’s top – which came in both a children’s and an adult’s version – was exhibited at the Society of Arts in spring 1859. It was on sale in London with Elliott Brothers, and with Smith, Beck, and Beck. It was also sold by John Benjamin Dancer in Manchester. The top received over a dozen favourable reviews in the year following its appearance – although one pointedly remarked on its resemblance to James Clerk Maxwell’s.

The apparatus underwent changes over the years; but its function remained the same. In its basic form, a wooden disc – overlaid by one or more coloured paper discs – was set in rapid motion, with the aid of stabilising ‘handle’, by pulling a string wound round its spindle. This caused the colours to mix optically. More complex effects could be obtained by using ancillary discs.

In an article of January 1859, Gorham explained how different combinations of discs could demonstrate the effects of ‘optical’ mixture and ‘simultaneous contrast’ described by Chevreul. Gorham also mentioned how Chevreul had described how contiguous colours fade in saturation as they move away from ‘the line of contrast’ between them (Mach’s bands). Later, Gorham elaborated on the top’s ability to create coloured patterns useful to ‘the artist’, similar to those advocated by Chevreul enthusiast, J. Gardner Wilkinson, in On Colour of 1858.

Gorham’s most significant observation was that although ‘green’ could be made by ‘the union of yellow and blue’ pigments, ‘there is not a yellow and blue in existence’ that could produce ‘even a tolerable green’ optically (although a review in The Engineer stated the opposite). Hermann von Helmholtz explained why this was the case in ‘On the theory of compound colours’ of 1852, drawing on experiments with a top (similar to those subsequently described by Maxwell in 1855). Gorham did not understand the anomaly, however, since his understanding of colour mixture was premised on the 1851 edition of Kirkes’s and Paget’s Handbook of Physiology.

Helmholtz referred back to his top in his Physiological Optics, published in book form in 1867. This in fact included two illustrations of Gorham’s top (figs. 142 and 146), although it was described as the invention of ‘J. B. Dancer of Manchester’. The second of these shows it with a perforated black disc suspended on the spindle above the coloured discs. In this state it produces what Gorham called ‘multiplied figures’ – stroboscopic and phi phenomena which Helmholtz approvingly described as ‘variegated images which sometimes appear to jump about, and sometimes to move continuously’.

Bibliography

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