page_title: Munsell color system
section_title: History and influence
hierarchical_section_title: Munsell color system / History and influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere (Die Farbenkugel). The top two images show the surface of the sphere, while the bottom two show horizontal and vertical cross sections. Taken from http://www.uni-mannheim.de/fakul/psycho/irtel/colsys.html. "Ansicht" is "Perspective"; "Durchschnitt" is "Cut-out". Hues labeled R, O, G, Gr, B, V are red, orange, yellow (Gelb), green, blue, violet. Note:There are mathematical issues with this depiction. For instance, if one calls the concentric rings of the bottom right image "chroma" (counting from the center outward) and the horizontal stripes (counting from the bottom to the top) of the bottom right image "lightness", then it is not possible to specify a color whose "chroma" is 2 and whose "lightness" is 9. This means that each color cannot be uniquely identified by a single set of "hue", "lightness" and "chroma" values.
context_page_description: In colorimetry, the Munsell color system is a color space that specifies colors based on three properties of color: hue, chroma, and value. It was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th century and adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture as the official color system for soil research in the 1930s.
  Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three-dimensional color solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and he was the first to illustrate the colors systematically in three-dimensional space. Munsell's system, particularly the later renotations, is based on rigorous measurements of human subjects' visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis. Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell's system has outlasted its contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by models such as CIELAB and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.
context_section_description: The idea of using a three-dimensional color solid to represent all colors was developed during the 18th and 19th centuries.  Several different shapes for such a solid were proposed, including: a double triangular pyramid by Tobias Mayer in 1758, a single triangular pyramid by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1772, a sphere by Philipp Otto Runge in 1810, a hemisphere by Michel Eugène Chevreul in 1839, a cone by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1860, a tilted cube by William Benson in 1868, and a slanted double cone by August Kirschmann in 1895.  These systems became progressively more sophisticated, with Kirschmann’s even recognizing the difference in value between bright colors of different hues.  But all of them remained either purely theoretical or encountered practical problems in accommodating all colors.  Furthermore, none was based on any rigorous scientific measurement of human vision; before Munsell, the relationship between hue, value, and chroma was not understood.
  Albert Munsell, an artist and professor of art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design, or MassArt), wanted to create a “rational way to describe color” that would use decimal notation instead of color names (which he felt were “foolish” and “misleading”), which he could use to teach his students about color.  He first started work on the system in 1898 and published it in full form in A Color Notation in 1905.
  The original embodiment of the system (the 1905 Atlas) had some deficiencies as a physical representation of the theoretical system. These were improved significantly in the 1929 Munsell Book of Color and through an extensive series of experiments carried out by the Optical Society of America in the 1940s resulting in the notations (sample definitions) for the modern Munsell Book of Color.  Though several replacements for the Munsell system have been invented, building on Munsell's foundational ideas—including the Optical Society of America's Uniform Color Scales, and the International Commission on Illumination’s CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02 color models—the Munsell system is still widely used, by, among others, ANSI to define skin and hair colors for forensic pathology, the USGS for matching soil colors, in prosthodontics during the selection of shades for dental restorations, and breweries for matching beer colors.
caption: Runge’s Farbenkugel (Color Sphere), 1810[a]
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