Sir Isaac Newton discovered that white light can be broken down into its composite colours. Prior to this, most scientists believed that light was fundamentally white in Colour.
When Newton started his experiments with light in the 1660s, our knowledge of light was saddled with many misconceptions. People thought that colour was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms coloured light. Even scientists like Robert Hooke were proponents of this theory. Realising the inconsistencies in the existing ideas about light, Newton set up a prism near his window, and projected a beautiful spectrum consisting of the rainbow of colours in visible light, 22 feet onto the far wall. To prove that the prism was not colouring the light, he recombined the light back together.
Newton’s demonstration of the composition of light was a novel experience to the scientific world. Though he announced his discovery in 1670, the world took notice of it only in 1704 after he published his findings in his book Opticks. His discovery laid the foundation of modern physical optics.
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