2026-06-27
Book: Colour-matching on textiles : a manual intended for the use of dyers, calico printers, and textile colour chemists, containing coloured frontispiece, twenty-nine illustrations, and fourteen dyed patterns in appendix by Paterson, David (1901)
Read it: Internet Archive
Tucked into the frontispiece of a forgotten Victorian textile manual is a warning that every modern shopper has unwittingly experienced — but that few of us can name. David Paterson, a Fellow of the Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, opened his 1901 manual with a colored plate showing the same dyed fabrics under two different illuminations. The caption is blunt:
"This Plate illustrates the abnormal modification in some dyed shades under artificial light."
Paterson was a working colour chemist in Scotland — author of Colour-Printing of Carpet Yarns and Science of Colour-Mixing — and he wrote this book because, as he put it in the preface, "no book has yet appeared on the important subject of the colour-matching of dyed textiles." The subject, he insisted, was no trifle:
"The subject is a comprehensive one, comprising as it dor[es] the study of colour-perception, the qualities of daylight, the optical properties of the fibres and dyestuffs employed, and also the influences of artificial illumination on colour appearances."
What Paterson was describing — and what his frontispiece demonstrated with paired daylight/gaslight swatches — is what colour scientists now formally call metamerism: the phenomenon where two samples appear identical under one light source and obviously mismatched under another. Two greens dyed with different pigments can be indistinguishable in afternoon sunlight, then split into a bluish-green and a yellowish-green the moment you flick on a gas lamp (or, today, an LED bulb).
The term "metameric match" wouldn't be formalized in modern colorimetry until decades later, with the CIE standard observer functions of 1931 setting the mathematical framework. Paterson had no spectrophotometer, no chromaticity diagram, no concept of standard illuminants A, D65, and F11. He had gaslight, daylight, and the trained eyes of dyers who lost contracts when a customer's drawing-room lamps revealed a mismatch invisible at the loom.
His diagnosis was correct in every essential. He understood that:
Modern industry confirms him daily. Paint stores keep "lightboxes" with switchable D65, incandescent, and fluorescent sources because a swatch that matches your kitchen tile under the showroom's halogens may clash horrendously under your fluorescent tubes. The shift from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents and then LEDs — each with wildly different spectral power distributions — has resurrected exactly the problem Paterson illustrated. Anyone who has bought a "black" suit that turned out navy in the parking lot has rediscovered his frontispiece.
His little manual quietly anticipated a $200-billion problem in modern retail logistics: colour management across supply chains. He saw it in 1901, with gaslight.