Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney was born on this day in 1843.
English astronomer and chemist who investigated colour photography and colour vision. He pioneered a method to measure the relative proportions of the primaries in a sample colour. Having developed a suitable photographic emulsion, he was the first to take infra-red photographs, and study the solar infra-red spectrum. In 1877, he was first to suggest a relationship between a star’s rapid rotation and broadened lines in its spectrum. He introduced hydroquinone (1880) as an effective photograph developing chemical. He co-authored a paper (1885) on infra-red spectra of organic compounds, studied how sunlight is altered in passing through the atmosphere and invented the abney level
123700login-checkJuly 24th – Sir William Abney
