A new dispute: is yellow a primary colour?
Ever since Goethe developed the colour scale that was valid until the invention of television, people have been asking themselves whether this invention might not have been the work of a confused mind. Sure, we all know that yellow and blue make green, blue and red make purple and red and yellow make orange, but then how do we explain that despite the RTL logo's earlier colours of red, yellow and blue, it is claimed that red, green and blue are the primary colours of TV?
Well, then try to paint a banana, honey, a lemon or the lower third of the German flag from these three parts - it doesn't work without yellow.
The explanation is quite simple: television glows - not in a spiritual or even spiritual sense, more like light itself.
We think the sun shines yellow. Well, it does a bit, but to make the spectral analysis of the refraction of light by gases in our atmosphere a little easier in the short term, let's say (colourless) light is white; black is the full colour mass. If you subtract one or more colours from this full colour black, you have to start from red. Green and Blue to get the full colour range as well, until it finally becomes white. This is why it is called the subtractive colour system (compare picture on the right).
In the case of material colours (chemistry is the study of materials and their properties, not to be confused with the profession of tailors, who make fabrics for clothing), on the other hand, there is indeed also yellow. However, not in combination with red or blue, as these basic colours do not exist at all. Instead, Telekom and Twitter have bought into it: They call magenta and cyan the top dogs in additive colour mixing. As in the example above, yellow and magenta mix to form red and cyan and magenta to form blue. Sounds funny, but that's how it is. The problem with colours that all add up to black and are therefore called additive, as in the case of motor oil additives, is that with red, yellow and blue, no magenta or cyan could be achieved. And now just think of something like pink elephants or turquoise sea ... all illusion.
How many visible colours are there?
For people with an affinity for computers, the answer is quite simple: between 256 at 8 bits and 16.67 million at 32 bits. The average Central European would not admit that he cannot distinguish more than 65536 colours, but the computer knows the solution for that too: it is the decimal numerical value for '2 to the power of 16' or '2 to the power of 8 to the power of 2'. We are not more than the sum of our parts, but only the part of a computer.
The enlightenment about the clever connections and what Goethe could not yet know in his Theory of Colours, which he created more because of the connection to emotions and the human spirit, because according to his records he had neither a cable connection nor a satellite antenna, can therefore only be proven with certainty for the beginning of colour television. If Goethe had at least owned a tube television and had come very close to the screen with a magnifying glass, his drawing (see left) would certainly not look like a ring, but like three stripes lying next to each other, consisting of red, green and blue. Yellow is only an illusion of magenta and red - or (see above) of pink elephants and turquoise sea.