Development of the Anlab colour system

Everybody concerned with colour is conscious of a need to arrange colours in a systematic fashion. Ever since the Swedish priest and astrologer Aron Forcius showed in 1611 how they could be arranged in a sphere, many different systems have evolved. Two of these stand supreme, the Munsell System (1918) which has particular value for those who want to look at colours, and the CIE System (1931), indispensable for those wanting to measure them. Each system has had an impact on the other: the spacing of the Munsell colours was considerably improved after they had been measured using the CIE system, and the revised Munsell spacing has given rise to many methods of measuring colour differences, which is perhaps the next major advance in applied colour measurement. In spite of this, however, the two systems have not become integrated, and even though computers are widely available the difficulties are immense.