Ogden Rood

Ogden Rood

Ogden Nicholas Rood (3 February 1831 Danbury, Connecticut – 12 November 1902 Manhattan) was an American physicist best known for his research in color theory and his 1879 book Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (German translation in 1880; French translation in 1881). Rood, a professor of physics at Columbia University from 1863 to 1902, was elected in 1865 a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 1880 a Member of the American Philosophical Society.

Quotes

• In all his experiments with the Leyden jar, Feddersen found that the discharge proceeded simultaneously at each electrode, positive electricity starting from the positive and traveling toward the negative electrode, while at the same exact instant of time negative electricity started for the positive electrode. This is also known to hold good with voltaic electricity, and there seems to be no reason why it should not also true with the induction coil, so as to render applicable to the induction spark the results obtained with the Leyden jar or electric machine.
  • (November 1864) "Article XXXVI.—On the study of the Electric Spark by the aid of Photography". American Journal of Science, 2nd series (issue 114): 361–372. (quote from p 363)

• After the completion of my first set of experiments on the duration of the discharge of a Leyden jar, I became anxious to make some measurements of the duration of a flash of ordinary lightning, which may be considered equivalent to the discharge of an immense jar with an enormous striking-distance.
  • (1871) . "On the duration of flashes of lightning". The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 41 (271): 159–160.

• The advance from drawing to painting should be gradual, and no serious attempts in colour should be made until the student has obtained proficiency in outline and in light and shade. If the artist cannot draws objects in a rather masterly way there is no point in his attempting colour.
  • Students' Text-book of Color; Or, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1881.

• ... the sensation of sight is produced by the action of very minute waves on the nervous substance of the retina; that is to say, by the aid of purely mechanical movements of a definite character. When those waves have a length of about 1/39000 of an inch, they produce the sensation which we call red—we see red light; if they are shortened to 1/41000 of an inch, their action on us changes, they call up in us a different sensation—we say the light is coloured orange; and as the lengths of the waves are continually shortened, the sensation passes into yellow, green, blue, and violet. From this it is evident that colour is something which has no existence outside and apart from ourselves; outside of ourselves there are merely mechanical movements, and we can easily imagine beings so constructed that the waves of light would never produce in them the sensation of colour at all,but that of heat.
  • "Chapter II. Production of Colour by Dispersion". Rood's Modern Chromatics: A Text-Book of Colour with Applications to Art and History. Read Books Ltd. 2021. ISBN 9781528759991.  (372 pages; originally published in 1879 with the title Modern Chromatics with Applications to Art and Industry)

External link

• Edward Leamington Nichols, Biographical Memoir of Ogden Nicholas Rood, 1831-1902. National Academy of Sciences (1909).