Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.15829

    Prism experiment

    Date
    27 March 1676
    Creator
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p3
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 206mm
    width (page): 157mm
    Subject
    Physics
       > Optics
    Content object
    Description
    Diagram of a prism experiment described in a letter to Henry Oldenburg dated 27 March 1676, from Anthony Lucas (1633-1693), a Jesuit professor of theology at Liège. The letter was read at the meeting of the Royal Society on 8 June 1676 and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 11, no. 128 (1676), pp. 692-98, with the figure in tab. 2.
    Object history
    On 8 June 1676, one of the letters read was ‘Written at Liege, 27th May, 1676, by Mr. Lucas, successor in the mathematical professorship there to Mr. Anthony Linus, containing partly an account of the success of Mr. Newton’s experiment there; partly some new objections against Mr. Newton’s theory of light and colours. This letter was ordered to be copied, and the copy to be immediately sent to Mr. Newton at Cambridge for his answer thereto’ (Birch 3:318).

    Anthony Lucas, 'A Letter from Liege concerning Mr. Newton's Experiment of the Coloured Spectrum; together with Some Exceptions against His Theory of Light and Colours’, Phil. Trans. vol. 11, no. 128 (August and September 1676), pp. 692-98, tab. 2, figs 5 and 6, prism projection.
    Related fellows
    Henry Oldenburg (1612 - 1677, German) , Scientific correspondent
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > Belgium
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