Michael Rossi, University of Chicago
Chemical Heritage Foundation - Brown Bag Lectures (Philadelphia, PA)
Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
Event Type: Open to the Public
Fee: Free
RSVP Online: No Registration Required
Between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th, a broad coalition of scientists, artists, industrialists, and educators in the United States struggled with the problem of how to measure, define, and standardize color sensations. Human beings seemed capable of perceiving millions of distinct color sensations. Moreover, in the rapidly changing economy and culture of the progressive-era United States, Americans in particular appeared bent on putting these sensations to work in the production of all manner of outlandish commercial amalgamations of light and pigment. But how to identify each of these sensations with lasting precision and accuracy—so that, for example, a consumer in Chicago could order a precise shade of upholstery from a manufacturer in Philadelphia, or a civil engineer could properly designate the color of traffic lights, or a teacher could describe to her pupils accurate rules of color harmony—was a vexing matter. Color seemed to be so real, so definite, so indisputably an aspect of the brute facts of physical existence, and yet was evidently entirely fleeting and resistant to codification according to the very natural sciences—for instance, chemistry, physics, physiology—that seemed to produce color sensations in the first place.
This talk examines attempts to tackle “the color question” (as board-game manufacturer Milton Bradley put it) in the United States from 1880 to 1930. Starting from small, proprietary systems of color standardization developed by individual scientists and manufacturers at the end of the 19th century, by the middle of the 20th century, color had become a public good—a common resource administered by bureaucratic bodies like the National Bureau of Standards and the Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (International Commission of Illumination). Along the way to defining what standard colors were, researchers had to make subtle but profound decisions not simply as to the identity of particular colors or qualities of colors but as to the nature of color itself and the relationship among individuals, society, and the visible real.
Michael Rossi is a historian of medicine and science in the United States from the 19th century to the present. His work focuses on the historical and cultural metaphysics of the perception: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their bodily selves and those of others. His first book manuscript traces the origins of color science—the physiology, psychology, chemistry, and physics of color—in the late-19th-century United States to a series of questions about what modern America ought to be: about the scope of medical, scientific, and political authority over the sensing body; about the nature of aesthetic, physiological, and cultural development between individual and civilization; about the relationship between aesthetic harmony, physiological balance, and social order.
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.