It was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that Isaac
Newton's earliest optical paper was published in 1672. The result of
experiments arising from Newton's attempt to solve the problem of
chromatic aberration in telescopes (he had been grinding his own lenses
for nearly a decade), he concluded that white light contained all colors
and that different colors were refracted to different degrees. His effort
yielded a valuable practical result still in use today: Having determined
that a very long ratio of aperture to length would result in spyglass
tubes of unwieldy size, he solved the problem by inventing the reflecting
telescope, described in Book I of Opticks
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The Principia (Great Minds)
