Timeline

Another view is this. The time was ripe for Newton's ideas, but suppose that he had not appeared and a group of lesser minds had made his discoveries. They would still be geniuses, but maybe two mathematicians and two astronomers, reading each other's work. They would have had an extended period of uncertainty and controversy while they shared their ideas. They would have needed an atmosphere of patience and tolerance for uncertainty. Today, some scientists enjoy such a climate, but others do not.

Big bang of engineering: The two centuries after Newton were a time of great progress for science in general and physics in particular. Engineering was systematic, but technologies were narrow. The 1800s were the age of steam. Also in that era, a funny thing happened. Great minds seemed to work harder and harder, and new ideas were formulated in detail by Gauss, Ohm, Faraday, Henry, Helmholtz, Hamilton, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and others. Using physics that was freshly made clear, Charles Proteus Steinmetz developed the concepts and wrote the textbooks of systematic electrical engineering. Then at the turn of the century, it was enough. You could call it the big bang of engineering, or maybe the ragtime singularity. Edison's electric lights (first patented in 1880) gave impetus and electrical engineers were ready to string their wires and electrify the world. With great new textbooks (plus slide rules and graph paper) engineers had the confidence to change the world. With their collection of ideas from the Ragtime Era, engineers could feel well-trained and even arrogant for a good 50 years. Even vacuum-tube amplifiers were mainly an application of 19th century physics. In the 1950s, transistors were a new paradigm but somebody had to wire them up, so traditional engineering remained vital.

While 19th century ideas were a legacy for engineers to study and apply, physicists in the ragtime era were moving on. 1905 was Albert Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, in which he published 4 groundbreaking articles on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence. That was the starting bell for a new era in which physics moved beyond the great discoveries of the 19^th century.

So?? So engineers had what they needed, neatly packaged. That was all very well. They took their legacy for granted, as people do. But if we stop to think about the legacy, we notice:

A simple idea in freshman physics is that momentum, mv, is conserved. So is kinetic energy, (1/2)mv² . But that's not really simple, it's confusing that the two derived quantities are both conserved. It took 100 years of discussion to sort it out. See the "vis viva" item below, a 2006 history of science article. So, there was a 100-year age of vis viva, or momentum and kinetic energy.
From Galvani's twitching frog legs to Maxwell's equations and Edison's first light bulb patent in 1880 was roughly a 100-year age of electricity.
From Galileo to William Rowan Hamilton is roughly a 200-year age of mechanics. Add on a few decades for Heaviside and Gibbs to develop vector methods as they now appear in textbooks.
From Newton to Maxwell and Helmholtz, count a 200-year age of color, from Newton's demonstrations and theory to the mature theory that Frederic Ives soon applied as a basis for color photography.
In short, it takes extended discussion by great minds so that a topic emerges clear and simple and ready for the engineering textbooks.

Now look for a creative period that establishes the scientific understanding of lighting. It has barely started. The traditional attitude is mainly that light is good.

Genesis Ch. 1, ver 3: "And God said, Let there be light and there was light."
Genesis Ch. 1, ver 16: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also."

So, light is good, and there are different kinds of light. That is very well. Artists might begin to notice more, how lighting conditions vary and how light interacts with objects. To take us toward scientific understanding, we have little legacy from ancient times, or from Galileo or Newton, or even Maxwell. To begin to understand lighting, we require the whole package of classical physics, from Newton's insight that white light is (usually) a mixture of all colors, to the laws of optics, and the methods of radiometry and photometry, plus some modern understanding of topics like color mixture. Late innovations to enable calibrated optical measurements were Grayson's ruling engine for diffraction gratings, described in a 1917 publication, and work, including by Langley, on measurement of optical power. (See below.)

Steinmetz's summer cabin, now in a museum.

Interior of Charles Proteus Steinmetz's summer cabin, now preserved at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, near Detroit, Michigan.

Daylight is variable, but on a sunny day it comprises the rays from the sun's disk plus light from the rest of the sky dome. The sun covers only about 10^-5 of the sky dome. ["Lighting quality and light source size," Journal of the IES 19(2):142-148 (Summer 1990). Web version.] Before electric lighting, artificial lights were flames: campfires, candles, oil lamps and so forth. At right is an interior view of Charles P. Steinmetz's summer cabin, showing among other things a kerosene lamp. (The cabin is preserved in a museum. The photo was taken by Nicholas J. Worthey in 2004.)

Then in the age of flame lighting, what did Edison invent? An incandescent lamp, with a filament that was relatively bright and compact and had the color of a flame. With present knowledge we can confirm that the filament was an approximate blackbody radiator and indeed had a spectrum similar to that from a flame. Edison probably understood as much--took it for granted.

In short, incandescent lights were a small step away from the world of flames for lighting. In the year 1912, a person could be an illuminating engineer, but he had mainly one source to work with. The engineering had to do with

The size and number of incandescent bulbs,
and where to put them,
and how to wire them up,
plus the design of glass globes and lenses.

Those were challenges enough. Other sources included carbon arcs and gas mantles, also physically compact and approximating the blackbody spectrum.

What would a scientific discussion of lighting look like?

An engineered light source accepts power in electrical form (usually) and by some physical process causes some of that power to be radiated as visible light. That light is reflected by objects that in themselves are not light sources. In reflecting the light, objects reveal themselves because they have textures, colors and shapes. The properties of the light and those of the objects become tangled together, then if a person views the scene, his visual system will, if possible, separate out the object properties. The person sees the objects and that experience is simple to him. The process of vision not really simple, but it seems simple because evolution has done such a good job with vision.

The way that the object and light become entangled and then the eye untangles them, those topics have been studied under such headings as color constancy and shape from shading. In the 20th century, Edwin Land did demonstrations to show the light's effect, and developed a theory to describe how the eye might compensate. Land's demos led to nicely illustrated articles in Scientific American magazine, which show the interesting apparatus that he built.

Land, Edwin H., “Experiments in Color Vision” Scientific American (May 1959): 84-99.
Land, Edwin H., “The retinex theory of color vision,” Sci. Am. 237(6): 108-128 (1977).
Land, Edwin H., “The retinex,” Am. Sci. 52(2): 247-264 (1964).
McCann, John J., Suzanne P. McKee, and Thomas H. Taylor, “Quantitative studies in retinex theory: a comparison between theoretical predictions and observer responses to the ‘color mondrian’ experiments,” Vision Res. 16, 445-458 (1976). (Based on Land's ideas and apparatus, though he was not an author.)
James A. Worthey, "Color rendering: asking the question," Color Research and Application 28(6):403-412, December 2003. (This article looks to the McCann, McKee and Taylor article just cited for some insight about lighting.)

The lighting user presumably wants to see, so he needs the disentangling process to work. A scientific study of lighting might begin with this broad insight, then move along to see how lights differ and how that affects vision. On that basis, and going back to the early days of electric lighting, one 1912 article stands out. [Herbert E. Ives, "The relation between the color of the illuminant and the color of the illuminated object," Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society 7:62-72.(1912).] The article is discussed below, but Herbert Ives's key observation was “It is, for instance, easily possible to make a subjective white, as by a mixture of monochromatic yellow and blue light. A white surface under this would look as it does under ‘daylight’ but hardly a single other color would.” Above is Fig. 1a from that article. The black lines are Ives's original drawing, then the orange and blue lines are added to represent his "mixture of monochromatic yellow and blue light".

The one 1912 article is discussed below and in the summary for the OSA 2014 Imaging Science meeting. It stands out as an early attempt to make a scientific cause-and-effect statement about one issue in lighting. Here are some reasons that Herbert Ives's remark is important:

It hinges on a simple idea, but one that the reader may not have thought about. Even Newton, in his color article cited below, said that "whiteness ... [is] ever compounded, and to its composition are requisite all the aforesaid primary colours, mixed in a due proportion." Ives's reader in 1912, or 2014, might make a similar assumption. But Ives understood, perhaps from his own experiments, or from reading Maxwell, how vision really works. You can make a light as simple as "a mixture of monochromatic yellow and blue light" and it can be a visual match to white.
In basic science and engineering, simple examples are a mainstay of teaching or discussion: a beam with no mass, frictionless motion, and so forth. But the two-bands light is a rare extreme case in the context of lighting.
The example is described in physical terms, not in commercial jargon.
Also, the example was essentially hypothetical in 1912. It did not refer to any perceived problem in the lighting business at that time. But in a scientific sense it was very real, based on the known functionality of human vision and a light that is physically possible.
While the two-bands light was not a commercial product in 1912, it can help us to understand later commercial lights such as fluorescent, high-pressure mercury vapor and high-pressure sodium vapor.
Suppose that one understands the two-bands light, and one has a favorite broad-band light such as daylight. Call them the bad light and the good light. Then it is easy to envision a mixture of the bad light and the good one, set to some standard of mediocrity. That is an approximate description of the spectra of fluorescent lamps, which combine blue light plus a broad band in the yellow.

In short, a scientific discussion should be thought-provoking, should build on prior knowledge, and should reveal a basic issue. Herbert Ives's remark answers that description. It appeared in Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society, Vol. 7. See below for more discussion.

The true illumination engineering lies in the steps that go beyond electricity and wiring: positioning the lamps and designing lenses, reflectors and the sources themselves. Electricity can power not only carbon arcs and filaments, but other lights which do not mimic flames at all. Before vapor discharge lamps were common, it was understood how strange they could be. US Patent 1025932, granted to C. P. Steinmetz in 1912 explains: "Hence it appears that an arc between electrodes, at least one. of which is formed of mercury, should be an extremely efficient light-giving arrangement, and this is indeed the fact, but the mercury arc is, unfortunately, of an extremely disagreeable color., It gives a discontinuous spectrum containing the Fraunhoefer lines 4047; 4359; 5461; 5769 and 5790, and some fainter intermediate lines. The sodium line, 5890, sometimes appears faintly, but this is probably due to the action of the glass or the presence of some impurity."

A scientific approach would give some thought to idiosyncratic lights, even hypothetical ones, and how they might affect vision of objects. Herbert Ives's passing remark in a 1912 article, discussed at right, calls our attention to a uniquely strange hypothetical light, a white light that comprises just two narrow bands, a blue and a yellow.

Ives's example was hypothetical but not impossible and its strangeness is echoed in 20^th century technologies such as high-pressure mercury vapor lights, and even everyday fluorescent lights.

What does not live on is Ives's spirit of inquiry. His example, a kind of ideally bad light, does not speak to the physics of plasma discharges, but to the way the eye has evolved, with highly overlapping sensitivities in the red and green receptors. By the logic of the two-bands example, our vision of red-green object contrasts is uniquely at risk. But discussions of lighting and color seldom deal with these facts.

The two-band light is an extreme example for lighting and color. For the issue of light source size and placement, an extreme example would be that an object is lighted from all sides, as when it is in an integrating sphere. The discussion can then easily move to examples of compact sources (with small area) and the range in between. Other issues would call for other extreme examples.

A scientific approach would explore the cause-and-effect meaning of each issue and its extreme possibilities. In the 20^th century, there was a problem that hypothetical sources remained hypothetical. It was not possible, on a reasonable budget, to build an apparatus that allowed an experimenter to manipulate a parameter such as light source spectrum in a systematic way. The exception that proved the rule was Edwin Land's experiments with projectors, cited at right. The experiments stood out in that the experimenter could turn knobs and adjust the lights. It appears that the setups used considerable lab space and some money, but for a lighting experiment (rather than the interesting experiment that was done), even more projectors might be needed. (For readers who are not native speakers of English: "the exception that proves the rule" is an old expression meaning an exception or extreme case that tests a rule.) In principle, Land showed the way to new lighting experiments, but the apparatus was cumbersome and nobody extended his method to other kinds of experiments.

To learn more about the experiments with projectors as light sources, see http://mccannimaging.com/Retinex/Home.html , then visit the topics Color, Retinex, and Color Constancy .

21^st century technology, especially LEDs, will give new possibilities for systematic experiments. It will still take some money and electronics skills.