How was the color wheel invented?

Short answer

The color wheel was born in 1704, when Isaac Newton joined the two ends of the spectrum, red and violet; because for our eyes hues have no beginning or end, there is an unbroken loop from red to purple and from purple back to red. Over the next two centuries, Goethe, Runge, Chevreul, and Itten rebuilt the same wheel for different purposes: some to show the mixing of light, some the mixing of paint, and some how colors affect each other. That's why there is no single color wheel; each wheel reflects the question its builder was asking.

The spectrum is a line, not a circle

As we saw in BI-01, visible light is a range that extends, by wavelength, from violet at the short end to red at the long end. Physically, this is a line: it has two ends, and the ends never touch. So why do we arrange colors on a circle?

The answer lies in how the eye sees the spectrum. Violet, at the spectrum's short end, carries a shift toward red; the colors at the two ends look similar to the eye. What's more, when you mix red and violet light, you see a color that corresponds to no single wavelength in the spectrum at all: purple and magenta tones. These tones aren't in the spectrum, but the eye sees them as a natural bridge joining the two ends, between red and violet.

So hues form a loop for the eye: red to orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, purple, and back to red again. A line has to break this loop somewhere; a circle doesn't. This circular structure of hue is also a consequence of the visual system processing color in opponent pairs; opponent process theory is the subject of BI-11.

Newton: seven colors and a musical scale

The first known color wheel appears in Isaac Newton's Opticks, published in 1704. After his experiments splitting white light into a spectrum with a prism, Newton arranged the spectrum's colors around the circumference of a wheel and joined the ends of red and violet.

Newton's wheel has two interesting features. The first is that he divided the wheel into seven parts and set each part's size according to the intervals of a musical scale: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Newton thought there might be an analogy between the harmony of colors and the harmony of sounds. It's hard to see "indigo" as a separate color in the spectrum; the musical analogy carried much of the weight in choosing the number seven.

The second is that the wheel served as a calculating tool. Newton proposed estimating the color of a mixture of two or more colored lights by finding a center of gravity inside the wheel, weighted by the amount of each color. The closer the result sits to the center, the closer the mixture is to white; the closer to the edge, the more saturated it is. More than two centuries later, this idea would resurface in scientific form in the CIE chromaticity diagram, covered in BI-18.

Goethe and Runge: the wheel of paint, the eye, and the soul

A century later, the German poet and natural philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, thinking about color, pushed back against Newton. For him, color was less a property of light that a prism splits apart than a product of the eye and the meeting of light and darkness. Goethe's book Zur Farbenlehre was published in 1810.

A small wheel Goethe painted in watercolor in 1809 sums up this idea: a symmetric, six-colored wheel less than seven centimeters across. Orange, green, and purple sit between the primary colors yellow, blue, and red. On the wheel's inner ring, each color carries a human quality; on the outer ring are written mental domains such as "reason," "understanding," "sensuality," and "imagination." This wheel is an attempt to organize colors not only physically but by emotional and moral meaning as well.

Goethe's wheel is close to the painter's wheel: it takes yellow, red, and blue as its basis. We can say that the red-yellow-blue tradition we saw in DT-03 gained a new authority with Goethe, after Moses Harris.

In the same years, the German painter Philipp Otto Runge took a different step. In 1810, a few months before his death, he published the Farben-Kugel, which arranged colors on a sphere rather than a wheel. He placed the pure hues on the sphere's equator, white at one pole, and black at the other. The wheel thus became a cross-section of a three-dimensional color arrangement that also included the axis of lightness. The later development of these three-dimensional systems, including Munsell and NCS, is the subject of DT-14.

Chevreul: a factory's wheel

In the mid-19th century, the color wheel turned into a practical industrial tool. The chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who ran the dye department of the Gobelins tapestry manufactory in Paris, discovered simultaneous contrast while investigating a complaint that certain wool colors looked dull when placed next to each other; we saw this in DT-08 and BI-14.

Chevreul also built a detailed system so that dyers and weavers could name colors and position them relative to each other. In the color atlas he published in 1861, he showed a wheel of 72 tones, placing twelve base hues with five intermediate tones between each pair: from red to red-orange, from orange to orange-yellow, and so on. Each tone was also lightened and darkened in steps toward white and black.

Chevreul's wheel answered a very different question from Newton's: "Which wool should I place next to this one so both stay vivid?" For him, the wheel was a tool for quickly reading relationships of adjacency and contrast.

Itten: the school's wheel

The twelve-part wheel hanging on the wall in many art and design schools today traces back to the Swiss painter and teacher Johannes Itten. While teaching at the Bauhaus, Itten designed a twelve-part color star in Weimar in 1921 and described the system in detail in his 1961 book Kunst der Farbe.

At the center of Itten's wheel stands a triangle formed by yellow, red, and blue. Mixing these in pairs yields orange, purple, and green; six more intermediate colors sit between these six, forming a twelve-color ring. The wheel's strength is its simplicity: a student can see complementaries, neighboring colors, and triadic schemes at a glance. Itten's classification of seven contrasts is covered in DT-11.

Like the others, Itten's wheel is not a scientific measurement but a teaching tool. It rests on the painters' red-yellow-blue tradition; as we saw in DT-03, it doesn't match the logic of light or of printing ink. It's useful in design education, but it doesn't correctly predict how colors mix on a screen or in print.

Example — the same skin in two wheels

Itten's name also circulates today in the world of fashion and personal style, by another route. Stylists' clothing-color recommendations trace back to Itten's classification of colors by contrast, especially the contrast of saturation and the contrast of warm and cool; the four-season color analysis, popularized in 1980 by Carole Jackson's book Color Me Beautiful, is the best-known form of this tradition (MT-02).

It's useful to understand this system's history, but you must not read it as a law. Placing a person's skin into the "warm" or "cool" category depends on which wheel, which light, and which background you evaluate the same skin against. According to the calculation in BI-19, skin tones with very different lightness values fall close together in hue angle in CIELAB; on Itten's wheel, the same skin tones fall into two or three neighboring wedges between red-orange and orange-yellow. Which color counts as "harmonious" with a given skin tone depends on which wheel and which harmony rule you choose. Color consulting is a language of aesthetic preference; it is not a measured true-or-false rule.

Common misconception

Summary

1. We arrange colors on a wheel because, for the eye, hues form a loop: the spectrum's two ends, red and violet, are joined by purple and magenta tones that aren't in the spectrum.
2. Newton built the first wheel in 1704 to calculate light mixtures; Goethe built his in 1809–1810 as an arrangement of the eye and emotion; Runge built his in 1810 as a cross-section of a three-dimensional sphere.
3. Chevreul created a 72-tone wheel for dyers in 1861; Itten designed his twelve-part school wheel in 1921 and published it in 1961; each wheel answers its own question, and none of them is the single truth.

Test yourself

1. (Easy) In which book, and in which year, was the first known color wheel published?
2. (Easy) How many tones does Chevreul's 1861 wheel contain?
3. (Medium) Why do we arrange colors on a circle instead of a straight line?
4. (Medium) How does Runge's 1810 model differ from a wheel?
5. (Hard) What different questions do Newton's wheel and Itten's wheel answer?
6. (Hard) Why does classifying a skin tone as "warm" or "cool" depend on the wheel used and the conditions?

Answers

1. In Isaac Newton's Opticks, in 1704 ("Newton: seven colors and a musical scale").
2. 72 tones: twelve base hues and five intermediate tones between each pair ("Chevreul: a factory's wheel").
3. For the eye, hues have no beginning or end: red and violet, at the spectrum's two ends, look similar to each other, and purple and magenta tones that aren't in the spectrum bridge the gap between them. A line has to break this loop somewhere; a circle doesn't ("The spectrum is a line, not a circle").
4. Runge arranged colors on a sphere; he placed the pure hues on the equator and white and black at the poles. The wheel became a cross-section of this three-dimensional arrangement ("Goethe and Runge: the wheel of paint, the eye, and the soul").
5. Newton's wheel is aimed at estimating the color of light mixtures by finding a center of gravity inside the wheel; Itten's wheel is aimed at showing painters and designers complementaries, neighboring colors, and schemes at a glance ("Newton: seven colors and a musical scale", "Itten: the school's wheel").
6. The same skin tones fall into different wedges on different wheels, and light and background also change how skin looks; which color counts as harmonious depends on the wheel and harmony rule you choose, so this classification is a language of aesthetic preference, not a measured rule ("Example — the same skin in two wheels").

Sources

• Newton, I., Opticks, Book One, Part II, 1704; Newton Project digital edition.
• Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, "Farbenkreis zur Symbolisierung des menschlichen Geistes- und Seelenlebens," 1809.
• Chevreul, M. E., "Exposé d'un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs," 1861; Science History Institute digital collection.
• Getty Research Institute, "Bauhaus: Color," online exhibition.
• Itten, J., Kunst der Farbe, 1961.

Next step

DT-05 splits this lesson's wheel in two: it discusses why colors are divided into "warm" and "cool," the associations with fire and water, why warm colors seem to advance in space while cool ones recede, and the paradox of low-kelvin light being called warm. DT-09, in turn, focuses on the wheel's adjacency relationships: it covers analogous harmony, built from colors that sit next to each other on the wheel, and monochromatic harmony, built from variations in lightness and texture within a single hue.