and Professor Clifford, as well as with Professor Bowditch of Harvard.
During 1905 first mention is made of Arthur Howland who came to the studio and saw “all system but charts.”’ Mention is also made of Arthur S. Allen, and of Wilhelm Ostwald. Dr. Ostwald was in Boston that year, with his son and daughter, to give a series of lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Munsell and Ostwald had many conversations. Ostwald visited Munsell’s studio, and at one of Ostwald’s M.I.T. lectures he showed the Munsell color sphere and referred to the Munsell book. About this time a first contract to supply enamels, charts, and crayons for school supplies to be used in teaching the Munsell system was made with Wadsworth-Howland & Company of Malden, Massachusetts.[1]
A Color Notation (2) was published in 1905, and during that year first contacts were made with Favor, Ruhl and Company through Charles W. Bidwell, manager of the Chicago branch.
In 1908 Christine Ladd-Franklin and her husband returned from abroad on the same ship with Mr. Munsell. They had several color discussions on shipboard, and later at the Munsell studio in Boston. In 1908 there was also discussed the matter of an understudy for Otto Anderson, who was in charge of painting papers for Munsell charts at Wadsworth-Howland & Company, and F. A. Carlson was decided upon. (We understand from Mr. Carlson that from the beginning he did all of the painting, Anderson being the shop supervisor.)
From 1908 to 1911 there were many lectures and talks, a series at Columbia, one in Boston for art supervisors, a lecture at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. During this period the names of Professor Dow, Professor Yerkes, of Miss Patrick, and Professor Titchener, appear among those of a number of people Mr. Munsell met and talked or worked with in relation to his system and its application in the teaching field. In 1909 there is mention that in Mr. Drisco’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spectrophotometric measurements of his five middle colors were tried—“by daylight and tungsten.” No figures were given. In 1910 there is mention of receiving two copies of the new Color Atlas while cruising on his boat, the Ahmed II. These charts were evidently published first as a forerunner of the more complete Atlas, for a note from the Boston Journal, December 22, 1910, describes this Atlas as containing at present two charts, chart A, the value scale, and chart B, chroma scales for 5 hues. In 1911 there is mention of meeting E. C. Andrews of Chicago when he and Arthur S. Allen visited the Ahmed off Annisquam, Massachusetts. Though they went sailing, the diary reads “discuss ‘sequences’ and E. C. A.’s color form.”
In December of 1911 Mr. Munsell read a paper in Washington by invitation of the American Psychological Association, in which he described his system as “an experimental system built up with the aid of a new photometer, Maxwell disks, and the trained capacity of the painter using a consensus of many individual decisions to gain the mean of color discrimination.” At that meeting he met many of this country’s leading psychologists, and they received his paper so well that he was asked to repeat it before the meeting was over. During this visit to Washington, Mr. Munsell visited the Bureau of Standards and met Dr. Nutting, in charge of colorimetry, where he left a Munsell photometer for test. On January 18, 1912 Dr. S. W. Stratton wrote that he would be pleased to examine a full set of the Munsell elementary color samples and look over the system of scales. A series of the five middle colors, and a sixth sample intended to be a neutral 5/ were sent to the Bureau, and the diary notes that report No. 10696, dated February 28, 1912, signed by P. G. Nutting, was received from the Bureau of Standards. It contained the information given in Table I.
There is no reference in the diary to the fact that Mr. Munsell was invited to present a paper on his system before the Physiological Congress held at Gröningen in 1913 (5). But it is recorded that he sailed on June 23, 1913, and that on August 30 he went to Gröningen. No mention is made of his report, but he does list about two dozen persons whom he met at the conference,
- ↑ Arthur Howland later developed a system based completely on disk mixture, known as the Howland system. It was limited to as few disks as possible, using sector disks of very strong colors spun against a hole in a black box which provided his black. Mr. Howland’s Color Mixer was patented, and he was always on a search for new and stronger colors for his 4 to 7 standards that were used with a series of white sectors.
