The first British warning that colour-blind signalmen endangered railways and shipping, printed with the first of James Clerk Maxwell’s papers on colour perception

WILSON, George. Researches on Colour-Blindness. With a Supplement on the Danger attending the Present System of Railway and Marine Coloured Signals. Edinburgh: Sutherland & Knox; London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1855. First edition. Octavo (pp. [4], xx, [5]–180), with diagrams in the text, the half-title present. Publisher’s cloth. Pages 5 to 125 were printed from the standing type of the Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science, where Wilson’s papers first appeared between November 1853 and December 1854. Pages 153–159 contain James Clerk Maxwell’s On the Theory of Colours in relation to Colour-Blindness, a letter to Wilson dated Edinburgh, 4 January 1855.

Notes

George Wilson, Edinburgh chemist, biographer of Cavendish and first Director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland, collected here the ten instalments of his papers on colour-blindness with substantial new matter. The book records seventeen cases in detail, weighs John Dalton’s account of his own vision, and reports a survey of 1,154 men in Edinburgh and Leith, students, policemen and soldiers of the garrison among them, of whom about one in fifty-five proved markedly colour-blind (p. 130). Frithiof Holmgren of Uppsala, who introduced the wool-skein test, wrote that “It is to him, in fact, we owe the first efforts to establish regular statistics on this subject” (Color-Blindness in its Relation to Accidents by Rail and Sea, 1878, p. 136).

The Supplement carries the practical argument. It was read to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts in January 1855, and the Society printed and circulated it to the railway companies at its own expense. Red and green, the colours chosen for railway and ship signals, are the colours the colour-blind most readily confuse. Wilson reported that his papers had already led the Great Northern Railway to test its porters before admitting them (p. 125). He judged the Admiralty system of red and green side-lights, in force since 1852, “fraught with unsuspected danger to all who trust in it” (p. 149). Becker credits him as “the first in Britain publicly to point out the potential hazards of color-blindness in railwaymen and seamen.” Holmgren, writing after the Swedish collision of 1875 that prompted colour-vision testing on European and American railways, named Wilson as the first writer to draw attention to the accidents that colour-blind employees might cause “on railways and at sea” (p. 135).

The volume also prints the first of Maxwell’s papers on colour perception, so placed by his editor W. D. Niven (Scientific Papers, 1890, I, p. xxiv). Written to Wilson in January 1855, when Maxwell was twenty-three, the letter sets out the theory of three primary colour sensations derived from Young and Helmholtz, maps mixtures on a colour triangle, and explains colour-blindness as the loss of one sensation, so that “colour to the former is a function of two independent variables, but to an ordinary eye, of three” (p. 158). Wilson describes Maxwell’s spinning colour-top as a test for the condition and introduces him as “a mathematician and natural philosopher of the highest promise” (p. 151). Maxwell in turn sent his own readers to “an appendix to Professor George Wilson’s work on Colour-Blindness” for his experiments on colour mixture (Philosophical Transactions, 1860). W. White Cooper of London, charged with reporting on the state of ophthalmic science in England to the Brussels ophthalmological congress of 1857, wrote that “For acuteness and originality this volume deserves the highest praise” (quoted in J. A. Wilson, Memoir of George Wilson, 1860, p. 333).

Very good. Publisher’s cloth, the spine browned, the extremities rubbed and the corners bumped. The text lightly and evenly toned with occasional small spots. Half-title present.

References

Becker 422 (“The first book on color-blindness, and the most important monograph on the subject until the publication of Holmgren’s work in 1877”); Waller 10343; P. D. Sherman, Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century (1981), pp. 144–147; Dictionary of National Biography LXII, pp. 92–94. Frithiof Holmgren, Color-Blindness in its Relation to Accidents by Rail and Sea (Washington, 1878), pp. 135–138; Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882), pp. 203, 217; W. D. Niven, ed., The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890), I, pp. xxiv, 119–125, 415; Jessie Aitken Wilson, Memoir of George Wilson (1860), pp. 331–335. Compare John Dalton, “Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours” (1798), Garrison-Morton 5834, and Holmgren’s railway study of 1876–77, Garrison-Morton 5916.

Wilson’s case against red and green signals, printed with the young Maxwell’s first paper on colour perception.

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