Paint the Rainbow With This History of Color Quiz

In 1861, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell teamed up with photography professor Thomas Sutton to experiment with color. During their tests, they took three exposures of a multi-colored tartan ribbon, capturing it through red, green, and blue-violet filters. After producing the images, they were able to overlay them in a proof-of-concept that happened to be the first color photograph in history.

Adolf von Baeyer was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry "in recognition of his services in the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds." The most important of these was indigo, which would be able to be made industrially instead of extracted from plants, making it inexpensive and more accessible.

Before the rise of synthetic dyes, purple was the color of royalty. Tyrian purple, the most common such dye, was made from a species of sea snail. Dye makers would crack open the shell, extract the snail's mucus, and expose it to sunlight to create the violet shade. It could take up to 250,000 snails to create just one ounce of the magnificent dye.

Though color film had had a few successful experiments before "The Gulf Between," the 1917 movie was the first time Technicolor hit the Hollywood scene. The 58-minute movie, which starred Grace Darmond and Niles Welch, was essentially a proof-of-concept. The Technicolor process was expensive and hard on the eyes, but the company persisted, finally making it into the mainstream with the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz."

The logistics and delivery company UPS has been using the signature color "pullman brown" on its trucks since 1916, but it finally trademarked the shade in 1998 to permanently associate it with their brand. The color was originally chosen because it was considered "the epitome of luxury."

In a cave in Maltravieso, Spain, the walls depict images of animals, dots, geometric shapes, and hand stencils in red pigment. Using a complex method known as uranium-thorium dating, researchers concluded that the cave's artistic depictions are about 64,000 years old. The red ochre pigment is made of iron-laced soil, which is thought to be one of the oldest colors — if not the oldest — used in art history.

Sir Isaac Newton presented the world's first color wheel in the 1660s. He updated the color theory of the time, which said that color was a product of mixing light and dark, with red having the most light and blue having the most dark. Newton began testing the properties of white light and performed experiments with prisms, which helped him map colors into an octave schema and color wheel.

Around 2200 BCE, ancient Egyptians ground limestone and sand together with azurite, heated the combination to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit to produce glass, and then combined that with egg whites to create a long-lasting paint known as Egyptian blue — the first synthetically produced color pigment in history. The color was heavily used until the start of the Common Era, when new methods of color production evolved.

Green plants make their own food through photosynthesis, which uses a green pigment called chlorophyll. Located in tiny structures called chloroplasts, chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and transfers it into energy-storing molecules that can feed the plant nutrients.

Fuchsia, periwinkle, and lavender are all flowers that lend their names to vivid colors. Nature provides the names of a lot of the colors we use today, including other flowers like rose, violet, lilac, carnation pink, cornflower blue, goldenrod, marigold, and orchid.