Moses Harris was an entomologist in Britain at about the time the American colonies started that unpleasantness with tea stamps and flintlock rifles.
As well as studying insects, he was also an engraver. Maybe that explains why he had a thing for the way color worked – how sea green was related to sunset orange, what was the clearest way to sort indigo from periwinkle. He organized them in a circle, showing every shade between the primary (red, yellow, blue) and “compound” (orange, green, violet) colors, laying the foundation for, well, every electronic thing that uses colors.
Your computer monitor being one of them.
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