Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 6 – 7:30 p.m. EDT
Please join the Smithsonian Libraries on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 for a lecture featuring Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Contact us at 202.633.2241 or silrsvp@si.edu with any questions, or for access services (preferably two weeks prior to the program).
Quantifying color has always been slippery business. How have people interested in the subject come up with a common language – and common colors – so that people can talk comparatively and accurately about colors? Dictionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth century laid essential groundwork for modern color systems such as the Pantone system. This talk will discuss the ways that color dictionaries and descriptive charts gave naturalists, and many others, a language that was both visual and textual, for identifying with much greater precision just what a color was, and what a color name meant.