Name the scientist who first used a glass prism to obtain the spectrum of sunlight

Sir Isaac Newton was the first scientist to use a glass prism to obtain the spectrum of sunlight [1]. In the 1660s, Newton conducted a series of experiments where he allowed a beam of sunlight to enter a darkened room through a small hole in a window shutter [1][4]. By placing a glass prism in the path of this beam, he observed that the white light refracted and dispersed into an oblong rainbow of seven visible colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. To prove that the prism was not contaminating the light but rather decomposing it, Newton used a second inverted prism to recombine the colors back into white light [1]. This groundbreaking work, published in his 1704 book 'Opticks', fundamentally changed the understanding of light and color [2].

Sources

1. [1] Science , class X (NCERT 2025 ed.) > Chapter 10: The Human Eye and the Colourful World > Activity 10.2 > p. 167
2. [4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4360081/
3. [2] https://publications.essex.ac.uk/esj/article/id/150/