By the middle of the 16th century, high-quality triangular prisms were available (coincident with the rise of the Venetian glass trade), but scientists at the time still thought that the glass added color to white light.Ī prism disperses light (that is, it spatially separates light by wavelength) if the light goes from one medium (say, the air) into another medium (say, a glass prism) at an angle other than 90°. The prevailing view at the time was that the prism was adding color to the white light, which was the "pure" form of light. The six sides complicated matters, however, making it difficult for experimenters to figure out what was going on. Most people are familiar with transparent prisms that are used in the visible region of the spectrum.Īs early as the 13th century, six-sided crystals of natural quartz were used to generate rainbows (2). ![]() Prisms are usually transparent to the region of the electromagnetic spectrum being observed. In some cases, a prism has more than one function. ![]() A prism is an optical component that serves one of two major functions: it disperses light, or it modifies the direction (and sometimes polarization) of light (1).
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