ABSTRACT
When he was 23, Newton bought a glass prism “to try therewith the phenomena of colour.” And with this the science of optics started. He probably made many fundamental discoveries in that field during the next three decades of his life. However, sometime in February, 1692, a light, left burning in his room while he was away, started a fire that eventually destroyed his papers including a large work on optics describing the results of his research of twenty years. Nevertheless, he managed to reconstruct most of his experiments, and published his results in Optick in 1704.
