In 1890, a young color-blind sailor named John Smith was called before the Royal Society Committee on Colour-Vision. He had spent most of his life in service to a private shipping company, and had passed vision exams for all his certificates. When Smith took a vision test for his promotion to Mate's Certificate, his color blindness was finally exposed. He engaged a private oculist to examine him again, but “alas! found the Company's report too true!” Now, Smith was faced with a dilemma. The Board of Trade would permit him to continue his duties as a shipmaster, but he pronounced himself “morally incapable” of doing so:

Smith's remarks to the Royal Society underscored the ethical plight of the worker in a laissez-faire state. He was forced to bear the burden of weighing the public safety against his own economic interests. And by the time the Committee published its Blue Book Report in 1892, John Smith was dead. The official cause was consumption. But the Report suggested a different interpretation, in which the Board of Trade's negligence had destroyed the sailor. One witness noted that while Smith had been a hearty man, the fateful color vision test had proved his downfall: “the loss of (Smith's) situation, the having to give up the sea, and the destruction of his hopes so preyed upon his mind and body, that he became the victim of an acute phthisis and died.”²

The first documented case of color blindness in Britain was reported by the Royal Society in 1777: an account of Harris the shoemaker who complained of being unable to distinguish the red fruit in his garden from the surrounding green leaves.³

In 1794, the famed Quaker chemist John Dalton discovered his own insensitivity to certain colors: a defect subsequently termed “Daltonism.” Eighteenth-century accounts focused on the rarity of the disorder, and the amusing social improprieties it caused. Dalton was prone to parade in public in the cherry-red robes he had been awarded as a Doctor of the Civil Laws: an inappropriate outfit for a Quaker. Other authors recounted tales of an undertaker who lost business after covering a coffin in bright red fabric, and an M.P. who nearly caused his wife to divorce him by appearing at her mother's funeral dressed entirely in red. But the emblematic color-blind figure of the eighteenth century was Dalton himself, the heroic scientist who made his own idiosyncratic body the subject of communally beneficial experimentation.⁴

The gap between John Dalton, the virtuous chemist of the eighteenth century, and John Smith, the victimized and potentially hazardous worker of the nineteenth, was profound, although the physical defect was the same. As new sites of labor and industry were increasingly saturated with color—for example, through the deployment of flashing red and green lights on ships and railways—the color perception of workers became a major medical and legal concern. Color blindness in the eighteenth century had been just a “scientific curiosum”; now, it was a crucial political question.⁵

Achromatopia, or total color blindness, was exceedingly rare and accompanied by bad vision, photophobia, and nystagmus.⁶ Dyschromatopia, the term encompassing all other forms of color blindness, was regularly estimated at a rate of one in eighteen Englishmen, or 5.5 percent of the male population.⁷ The color-blind worker could wreak havoc on his fellow citizens, perhaps even more so than a consumptive or a cholera patient.⁸ Individual idiosyncrasy had become collective pathology; the object of scientific interest had become a social contaminant.

This article explores the historical relationship between scientific research and labor management, investigating the state supervision of color perception in British workers. Public safety debates about color-blind workers focused on railway men and sailors, who played a special role in national histories of wealth and maritime glory.⁹

Occupational expectations of mariners' vision were particularly complex, as the art of imperial navigation involved proficiency in sketching, mapping, and observation.¹⁰ The sailor had to be familiar with all the colors of lights for beacons, boathouses, and buoys, as well as being able to recognize the colors in the International Code of Signals and gauge his depth from various shades of water.¹¹ What the sailor saw—and how he judged his own observations—was of vital importance to British economic and political concerns, both at home and abroad. The government had a new interest in legislating the admittedly subjective realm of workers' perception. The state regulation of color vision demanded a way around the subjectivity of color perception and a rationale for standardizing “safe” and “dangerous” anomalies of sight. But at the same time, individual workers and unions sought to resist this legislation, engendering a complex set of power struggles between labor and science. British workers publicly and often successfully challenged any efforts to regulate their powers of perception. Here, I trace the articulation of color blindness as a “disease” in modern Britain and consider both the pathologizing and the valorization of workers' perceptions in an industrial society.

The study of color vision and public safety was inaugurated in Britain with George Wilson's Researches on Colour Blindness with a Supplement on the Danger Attending the Present System of Railway and Marine Coloured Signals (1855). Wilson was a Professor of Technology at the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland. His account of the causes of color blindness was entirely class-specific. Although Wilson's statistical evidence was garnered from military regiments, his anecdotal examples referred primarily to the highborn. He claimed that defective color vision was most common in “civilized” nations, and that it had a comparatively high incidence among the peerage.¹²

The prevalence of color blindness in Western Europe was due to the warping processes of industrial capitalism. Large numbers of Britons were “doomed by that which is a great source of their strength, to occupations which dwarf one or more of the external senses.”¹³ In the aristocrat, imperfect color vision was a charming and capricious quirk, in the nature of a parlor game to be performed for disbelieving guests.¹⁴ But the laborer's color blindness was of a unique type: destructive to his fellow man rather than scientifically illuminating, and imposed by the external conditions of his labor rather than congenital.

Wilson's study attracted scholarly attention in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Russia. But his treatise bore no legislative fruit in Britain. Individual railroad companies, like the Great Northern, had instituted testing procedures following a terrible accident at Arsley in 1876. But the national dangers were not eliminated. Although British railroads paid out £2 million per year for dead and injured railroad travelers, no Act of Parliament required color vision exams.¹⁵

Each company was free to adopt or neglect color vision tests as it saw fit; testing methods were not standardized.¹⁶ On the shipping side, the Board of Trade made color vision testing mandatory for promotion to Masters' and Mates' certificates in 1877. If a candidate failed, his certificate would be marked accordingly. But color-blind officers known for their good conduct and sobriety were allowed to maintain their positions as Masters.¹⁷ Ship owners could still choose to employ color-blind men, and vision regulations applied only to officers; look-out men were entirely unregulated.

Two competing camps of scholarship framed these regulations. In 1858, William Ewart Gladstone published his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, which used philological evidence—namely, the absence of specific color terms in ancient poetry—to argue that Homer and his contemporaries had been effectively color blind.¹⁸

Just as painters recognized the education of the individual eye, Gladstone claimed that this process of development had occurred for the entire human race. Primitive man had seen his world in a uniform hue.¹⁹ Gladstone's Whig history of color vision was embraced by German philologists, and denounced in Britain: notably, by the evolutionary biologist Grant Allen. In 1878, Allen circulated a questionnaire to missionaries, civil servants, artists, and tourists stationed throughout the British Empire, asking whether the “savages” in their area could distinguish mixed shades, such as mauve.²⁰ Based on this study—an amateurish affair compared to the famed Cambridge Torres Strait experiments some twenty years later—Allen concluded that the color sense was, and always had been, universal.²¹ At stake in the debate between Gladstone and Allen was the broader epistemological question of whether language functioned as an accurate record of perception.²² Allen rejected philology and argued instead from the evidence of artifacts: the blue and yellow pigments of Greek pottery and the remarkable diversity of hues in the African beadwork so much admired by British aesthetes.²³ He noted that modern British poetry, much like its ancient counterpart, was not especially rich in color terms; one might wrongly assume from Tennyson's stanzas that the Victorians saw the world in shades of gray. For Allen, objects always spoke louder than words.

Allen's theory trumped Gladstone's in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century in part because the impetus for studying color vision had changed. In 1875, the Swedish physiologist Frithiof Holmgren traced a fatal railway accident in his country to the defective color vision of a railway worker: specifically, to the worker's inability to distinguish red and green signals. Holmgren devised his own method of color vision testing in which the candidate sorted skeins of colored wool into matching groups.²⁴

Candidates kept their hands behind their backs at first and sorted the colors “by eye”; the examiner watched both their ocular movements and the muscular motions of their hands.²⁵ Initially, the Holmgren test was widely praised for avoiding the social biases of tests that depended on naming colors. Furthermore, it was easy to administer, and could be rapidly applied by non-specialists to large groups of people—at least 6000 mercantile marine candidates per year.²⁶ According to Holmgren, the attentive examiner could discern the candidate's intelligence and moral character, as well as his chromatic sense.²⁷

Holmgren's inquiry—which estimated that up to ten percent of Swedes were afflicted with color blindness—set off a spate of increasingly alarmist investigations in Germany, the United States, and finally, Britain.²⁸

In this context, Gladstone's theory of color vision seemed increasingly untenable. Gladstone treated modern color blindness as atavistic; the defective individual served as a rare physical reminder of a time when all men had been color-blind. But in the aftermath of Holmgren, atavism was an inadequate explanation for what looked like a national epidemic. Following the Arsley crash, many specialists argued that color blindness was a particularly British problem.²⁹ Britain was cited not only for its high rates of color blindness, but also for the laxity of its government in responding to this public safety crisis.³⁰ Gladstone might have gone awry in diagnosing ancient color blindness, but modern Britons seemed to be fast approaching such a condition themselves.

Color blindness was unique in modern taxonomies of disease: invisible, incommunicable, and purified through its early associations with Dalton. Indeed, the status of color blindness as a “disease” was unstable. It had no mechanism of contagion, yet it was often linked to social and psychological ailments that could deteriorate a national community. Holmgren described color blindness as distinct from other maladies because it did not require medical attention, yet he also referred to the color blind as “les viciés”—the tainted or the polluted.³¹

The Edinburgh psychologist Mary Collins argued that while color blindness might not be causally linked to depravity, the moral status of the individual depended in part on his or her color sense.³² Here she drew on Ogden Rood's famous suggestion that normal-sighted readers perform the experiment of imagining their fellow man without the sensation of color. Devoid of color, the human face immediately appeared “repulsive,” drawing attention to “how weary the world seems, divested of the fascinating charm which [color] casts over all things.”³³ The perception of color was thus a crucial faculty in the development of human sympathies, serving an important function in binding the individual to an otherwise unappealing community.³⁴

Several British scholars attempted to identify a color-blind personality in terms of moral characteristics, noting that the color blind were often dreamy and inattentive, even effete.³⁵

G.H. Taylor's study of British railroad workers proposed that some candidates might fail the vision test because they were “indifferent” to color: a result of leading “gray lives” in industrial Britain (à la Wilson). But Taylor concluded that truly color-blind candidates were visibly pathological:

Taylor examined two “healthy” color-blind lads, and reported difficulty in eliciting even a knee jerk in testing their basic reflexes. Other writers suggested phrenological explanations for defective color vision, linking color blindness to a physical abnormality of the anterior lobe.³⁷

One expert argued that the diagnosis of color blindness could be made solely from a “peculiar dazed, half-anxious expression” of the face and eyes.³⁸

In 1880, the Ophthalmological Society of London appointed a committee to test for color blindness in young British men.³⁹

The highest rates were found among the Metropolitan Police, closely followed by the boys at middle-class schools. Doctors' sons were slightly less likely to be afflicted, and Eton boys were the least likely of all.⁴⁰ The Times claimed that upper-class boys were more readily diagnosed, since their parents were apt to notice if they mistook the colors of their own possessions. Working-class boys were more likely to conceal the defect if they were aware of it, since they had a greater fear of being stigmatized in the labor force.⁴¹ The Society also noted a high rate of color blindness among Quakers, Jews, and deaf-mutes. Intrigued by this report, the anthropologist Joseph Jacobs and the art expert Isidore Spielmann teamed up to conduct experiments exclusively on English Jews. They confirmed that the Jewish inability to pass the Holmgren test was remarkable. Color blindness was especially pronounced among East End Jews: a rate of 14.8 percent compared to 5.5 percent of the British male population at large. Jacobs suggested that Jewish color blindness was not congenital, but environmentally produced:

The collective Jewish experience of modern urban living and East End poverty were the key factors in this ethnic anomaly. Jacobs concluded that early training could correct this defect, and that color lessons should form part of every Jewish child's education in order to create an independent Jewish artistic tradition.

The Board of Trade issued a report on mandatory testing in 1877, followed by new reports in 1885, 1910, and 1912. In 1877, the Board had relied on colored cards and glasses in black, white, green, red, yellow and blue, which were issued to the examiners with no special instructions as to how the candidates should be tested. In 1885, the Board clarified the testing procedures. Candidates were required to select cards in a color named by the examiner, who was typically an expert in seamanship without any medical training. The purpose of the test was simply to ascertain whether a candidate could name a basic color when it was set before him, not to investigate “his power of detecting and arranging all tints.” If ship owners refused to require their employees to take the test—for which the candidates were charged one shilling—and any accident resulted, “it cannot be laid to the door of the Board of Trade.”⁴³

These regulations were designed only to prevent color-blind sailors from obtaining promotions, not to remove them from their original positions.⁴⁴ Men who failed their color vision test in one port frequently passed upon reexamination in another; the London authorities passed nineteen percent of the candidates on appeal, while Liverpool passed forty-one percent and Aberdeen a shockingly high seventy-one percent.⁴⁵

The 1892 Blue Book by the Royal Society Committee on Colour-Vision was intended to correct these inconsistencies and promote legislation for standardized color vision testing. The Committee included men such as the future Nobel laureate physicist Lord Rayleigh, who had helped to lead the scientific debate on the visual acuity of “primitive” peoples. The Committee took evidence from 500 individuals, including ophthalmic surgeons, railway examiners, and members of the merchant marines, and examined samples of red and green railway flags, shards of red and green glass, and small bottles of vermilion enamel. Its Report stressed the problem of distinguishing “color ignorance”—which was entirely curable and required only a leave of absence for retraining—from actual defects of perception.⁴⁶

“Color ignorance” was a relatively new diagnosis, along with “color stupidity.”⁴⁷ The Committee had not initially believed that total color ignorance existed in Britain: that is, that a candidate might confuse the names of the red, green, and white signals without some congenital defect. But Staff-Surgeon Preston assured the investigators that such visual illiteracy was not uncommon, especially “in a certain class of recruits.”⁴⁸ The diagnoses of color ignorance and color stupidity extended the sphere of the examiners' powers, and increased the demands on the perceptions of British workers.

The Committee also discussed acquired color blindness, prompting new questions about labor and governance. Acquired color blindness, like color ignorance, was treatable, though both called for strict oversight and behavior modification.⁴⁹

The Committee noted that excessive tobacco use could produce color blindness, or tobacco amblyopia.⁵⁰ Cases of tobacco amblyopia were most common at sea, where men “have plenty of time to smoke excessively and also drink heavily.”⁵¹ Tobacco amblyopia was always characterized as male, prompted by mental depression, and a low state of general health.⁵² Patients were said to suffer from insufficient food and “domestic or financial worry.”⁵³ The worker was thus driven by economic anxiety to a state of disease. The Report included cases of hysterical color blindness, or neurasthenic amblyopia: commonly associated with women, or with “fussy, hypochondriac” men.⁵⁴ George A. Berry's manual, Diseases of the Eye, noted that male hysterical amblyopia tended to appear in countries with compulsory military service; therefore, the malady was not a major concern in Britain.⁵⁵

The Report ended with a wistful discussion about the relationship between examiner and subject, noting how difficult the testing process could be when labor concerns, rather than “pure” scientific inquiry, were at stake. The subjects' attitudes about the test ranged from “unwarranted pride” in their color sense to anxiety, dread, and deceit. The Committee recommended to Parliament that the colors used on ships and railways should be standardized, workers in these fields should undergo periodic testing by the Board's certified authorities, and candidates should have the right of appeal. Most importantly, the Committee proposed that all British examiners adopt Holmgren's method of color vision testing.⁵⁶

The shift to the Holmgren wools obviated certain problems with earlier testing methods; the Board's colored cards were easily procured from private dealers and the possibility of color-blind subjects being “coached” was a major concern.⁵⁷ The Committee noted hopefully that the Holmgren test might function as an educational experience, alerting workers to the joys of color study. “There is something attractive in the process” of sorting the wools, they said, “stimulating the interest, and hence not without benefit.”⁵⁸ The process of being tested was seen as a mechanism of universal improvement: educating and elevating all workers, as well as identifying the dangerously defective ones.

Just as the Royal Society began pressing the Board of Trade to regulate color vision testing, the railway unions threatened legal action to bar the tests. These unions argued that the diagnosis of color blindness had become a key mechanism for dismissing or intimidating unruly workers. Workers' descriptions of the Holmgren test evoked factory labor, in which exhaustion and repetition played a crucially dehumanizing role.⁵⁹

If a candidate changed his mind about a particular skein, he was judged by his initial impulse and was not allowed to choose again.⁶⁰ One letter from “A Main Line Driver” recounted the use of color vision testing as unfair labor practice:

Within the powerfully authoritarian world of railway service, the color vision tests provided an outlet for paternalistic supervision. Workers were often examined by their own supervisors rather than by trained medical professionals. Another worker reported on a man who mysteriously “became” color blind directly after he declined to carry coals and dig his foreman's garden.⁶²

Thomas Herbert Bickerton, the famed ophthalmic surgeon of Liverpool, became one of the most vocal critics of the Board of Trade's testing methods. Between 1885 and 1901, Bickerton carried out extensive researches on color-blind sailors, interspersing statistics from the Seaman's Orphanage with longer case histories documenting the social and economic impact of the tests. His “Notes on Colour Blindness” are compelling for the complex power struggles they reveal between medical practitioners and laborers, as sailors pleaded with Bickerton for his intercession with the Board.⁶³

Bickerton described scenes of devastated families and dramatic reversals of fortune:

Bickerton complained that color vision examinations were required only after men had completed their apprenticeships, wasted considerable expense in useless training and become “unfitted” for other kinds of work on shore.⁶⁵

He cited cases of suicide resulting from this policy, noting the irony that those stricken down were often the brightest and most ambitious of their profession.⁶⁶ The Board of Trade had failed to protect the laboring elites, who were punished for seeking advancement.⁶⁷

One of Bickerton's most detailed case histories involved a young sailor named Frank Downes, who sent Bickerton a lengthy account of his troubles in December 1898. Downes had joined the Aberdeen White Star Line in 1894, and no mention of color vision testing was made to him or his father. Downes estimated that his parents had spent well over £150 on his training. He served his four years' apprenticeship, and was failed in colors six months later when he applied for promotion. His letter concluded,

Bickerton personally examined Downes and pronounced him completely red-blind. But Jane Downes, Frank's mother, wrote to Bickerton in late December and challenged his diagnosis.⁶⁹

She attributed her son's failure to excessive tobacco use and inadequate training in colors, for which she held herself responsible. She concluded that the family had wrongly spent much time in training Downes' sister in colors without realizing that their son needed such an education to succeed as well. “We wish him to give up tobacco, then I will try him again on light shades I see he is on dark shades very good. I had no idea there was such a stiff examination in colors or I should have provided some for him to practice on.”⁷⁰ Jane Downes' amateur diagnosis rejected Bickerton's congenital explanations for her son's defect, and focused instead on the vagaries of domestic education.

Public safety claims were undermined by the threat that stricter regulations from the Board of Trade would make it harder for British lads to go to sea, while “foreigners of all shades, languages, and colors will find employment on British ships whether they have any eyes at all.”⁷¹

Because color blindness was understood as a peculiarly “civilized” disease, many foreign sailors were never tested for color vision.⁷² A safely regulated merchant marine might be populated entirely by Lascars rather than hardy British men.⁷³ Color vision testing thus made strange alliances in the world of labor and capital; “while in other cases the cry for more inspectors is favored by the trade unions, in this case, the persons to be inspected being largely members of trade unions, will not be so eager to join the cry.”⁷⁴ Generally, public safety did not marshal the same rhetorical power as “the ruined fortunes and broken hearts of our British sailors.”⁷⁵

The plight of the color-blind worker attracted considerable media attention: most notably in the well-publicized case of John Trattles. Trattles was born in 1878 at Staithes, a Yorkshire fishing village, and went off to sea in 1897 to begin his career in the Merchant Navy. In July 1905, he went up for his first mate's certificate and failed the color vision test. He appealed, and was examined by the Royal Society expert in color vision, Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney, who pronounced Trattles completely red-blind.⁷⁶

Trattles insisted that he could perceive all colors correctly, and refused to surrender his second mate's certificate. He received certificates from the Central London Ophthalmic Hospital and the South London Royal Eye Infirmary stating that his color sense was good, and demanded an inquiry.⁷⁷ The Local Marine Board was called in, and found Trattles competent. In May 1906, Trattles passed his examination for first mate. The Board of Trade convinced Trattles to submit to another examination by Abney. In May 1909, Trattles failed this exam, and again declined to surrender his certificate. Dr. William Ettles, pathologist to the Royal Eye Hospital, delivered a report on Trattles' case to the House of Lords in June. Ettles said the test had been unfairly administered; rather than asking Trattles to match the wools, Abney had instructed him to “pick out all the greens.”⁷⁸ Also, Abney had not followed the guidelines for testing persons of low intelligence. Ultimately, Trattles had come undone over the color violet, incorrectly matching a violet skein to seven other pinks that he had already selected. Ettles concluded that Trattles' judgment had broken down from the “nervous tension” of the exam itself.

The Board of Trade instituted a special court, presided over by Sir Francis Mowatt, to conduct a new round of tests for its recalcitrant candidate. The court commenced on December 2, 1909 at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Trattles had now been examined no less than six times, and had failed and passed three times each. Scientific experts on color blindness such as J. Herbert Parsons and W.H.R. Rivers testified against Trattles. Abney examined Trattles yet again in front of all members of the court, and pronounced him color-blind. When shown a purple skein of wool, Trattles snorted that this color was never used at sea.⁷⁹

He also called several captains, who had testified to his excellent performance under difficult sailing conditions. Commander Wilson-Barker, who represented the Trinity House Brethren, persuaded his colleagues to let Trattles take a “practical” test. On December 30 1909, Wilson-Barker took Trattles down the Thames in a steamer, testing him on colored lights. The commander noted that Trattles' color vision was so accurate that he was able to see the planet Mars. Mowatt ruled that there was no relation between sorting colored wools in a laboratory and seeing colored lights at sea. The British Medical Journal called the case “the death blow” to the Holmgren test.⁸⁰ Trattles' certificates were upheld, and the Board of Trade was ordered to pay all his costs.

The court hearings exacerbated the shipping industry's sense of a rift between science and labor. At the Board of Trade, the “practical” examination was seen as inconclusive.⁸¹

Many felt that they had sent a dangerously disabled man back out to sea. One civil servant later described Trattles as a “modest, perplexed, brown-eyed sailor . . . with no trace of the sea lawyer about him.”⁸² But other authorities perceived Trattles as an agitator. Abney found the case so vexing that he wrote to the Board of Trade to demand a larger fee for his services. He maintained that Trattles was only judging red and green by shades of light and not by color; “he may be right 99 times yet the 100^th may be wrong and be the cause of any kind of misfortune.”⁸³ One Board member declared the case “a ghastly waste of public funds—I myself saw the man call a bright-red light a green over and over again, and yet he was allowed to go to sea.”⁸⁴ Captain Trenery, who represented the Mercantile Marine Services, wrote to the Board to declare that while his natural sympathies rested with Trattles, he would remain convinced to the end of his days that Trattles was color-blind.⁸⁵

Immediately after the Trattles case, the Board became wary of refusing promotions. When one member proposed blacklisting color-blind officers, he was told that the Board “cannot touch” these men because another Trattles case would topple the administration.⁸⁶

In 1913, the Board asked fifteen candidates who failed their color vision exam to surrender their certificates voluntarily; only two sailors complied.⁸⁷ The British press treated the Trattles case as a victory for labor over the autocracy of scientific leadership and the Board of Trade. As one memoirist recounted, the case relayed “the drama of a humble Englishman up against a powerful machine and defeating it.”⁸⁸ For a brief period following the Trattles case, the Board avoided any challenge to sailors' accounts of their own perceptions.

The Board of Trade subsequently appointed a committee to investigate the exact degree of color blindness that posed a danger. This plan acknowledged that idiosyncratic vision was not always harmful to the public safety. Once again, the Royal Society was prominently represented on the Committee, despite the Society's recent failures: a fact much resented by the shipping industry.⁸⁹

The Committee conducted a series of experiments at Shoeburyness designed to show whether people who demonstrated defective color vision in a scientific laboratory were also liable to confuse the colored lights in actual sea service. The Shoeburyness tests thus constituted an official response to the Trattles debacle and a final effort to rehabilitate the Holmgren test. The Committee's Report (1912) concluded that “practical” tests were inferior to laboratory testing, since atmospheric conditions could not be standardized and candidates who were familiar with a given port had an unfair advantage.⁹⁰ The scope of Trattles' “victory” was limited to Trattles himself, who eventually became a master mariner. Practical experience at sea was rejected as a guide to the state regulation of color vision.⁹¹

D.H. Bernard's 1914 tract, All About Sight Tests, underscored the hostile response by the shipping community to the 1912 Report. The cover of Bernard's book depicted a red-cheeked sailor with the caption “Practice” in one corner; in the other, a cruel medical man probed the same hapless lad under the caption “Theory.” Bernard used the Trattles case as proof that scientists could not accurately determine whether a given officer could perform his navigational duties. He also provided compelling testimony from sailors who said they were heckled or intimidated by the examiners. One sailor who had failed a color vision exam described the “frigid atmosphere” of the Board of Trade testing room as “very disconcerting.” He acknowledged that he had once been diagnosed as “color ignorant” in Liverpool, although he described his own knowledge of colors with great pride:

This candidate was ordered to appear for Abney's lengthy “special examination” in London. He denounced the wool test, and challenged the authorities to test him with flags or lights. He added that it was possible he had gotten “fogged through being ignorant of the fancy colors . . . but standard colors I am absolutely positive that I can name correctly.”⁹³

Although the Royal Society had urged the Board of Trade to adopt the Holmgren test because it presumably avoided assessing the candidate's vocabulary (rather than his perception), the test had other biases revealed by examinees and labor unions. The Holmgren test required the candidates to make complex aesthetic judgments. For example, the Cambridge scholar, Charles Whitmell, instructed candidates to match Holmgren's skeins into the “prettiest pairs.”<

fnr rid="fn94"> Furthermore, critics argued that a foreign and effeminate test had been foisted on the British laborer. The trade paper, The Mechanical World, published letters from irate engine drivers who claimed that the tests were “foreign rubbish” from “scientific faddists” designed to discredit virtuous English workers. “Give us a true English test!” demanded one railway servant.⁹⁵ If the pathology of color blindness was predominantly male, the “scientific” method of diagnosis often seemed disconcertingly feminine. Railway companies did not hang skeins of colored wool upon their signal posts, and “it is most unfair that because a driver cannot sort wool as well as a lady in a Berlin wool shop the expert surgeon is to condemn him as unfit to drive a locomotive.”⁹⁶ The Trades Union Congress jeered the Holmgren tests as “more suitable for a young lady engaged in wool work than for a signalman's greasy hands.”⁹⁷ Various editorials implored the Board to “let the test fit the work,” arguing that a man might distinguish red and green accurately while failing to note the finer differences between peacock blue and ultramarine, or cardinal red and magenta.⁹⁸ The image of a “hoary-headed, rough-handed skipper” forced to match a jumble of skeins when “his missus would not let him choose her darning yarn” pointed to the disjuncture of science and labor on this issue.⁹⁹

The explosion of artificial colors was a key part of the testing debates. C.G. Sander lamented that compiling a dictionary of color-names was impossible by 1900, due to the hyper-profusion of aniline dyes; “not only is music jazzing, but color schemes have followed suit.”¹⁰⁰

In 1902, the British Ophthamological Society concluded that while there was no great harm in a Quaker accidentally donning a scarlet robe, as John Dalton had done, silk dealers in modern times dealt in upwards of two thousand shades. Color-blind workers resulted in serious economic losses as well as ongoing threats to the public safety.¹⁰¹ At the Board of Trade, sailors were tested with what they complained were nonstandard colors that could only be learned through constant exposure to burgeoning consumer cultures at home. Candidates were examined in fashionable “art shades,” such as zircon and wisteria. One journalist reminded the Board that the sailors lived far away from educational influences, and could not be expected to be familiar with the “newest fancy tints.”¹⁰² Bernard claimed that the Holmgren test was inadequate to account for the complexities of the modern palette; colors like heliotrope, for example, might properly be classed either with red or blue. For the ophthalmic surgeon J. Herbert Parsons, “new” shades such as mauve—famously discovered by the chemist William Perkin in 1856—posed the greatest challenge for Board candidates. That is, a sailor who had been isolated at sea was not only unable to name the color mauve, but also unable to see it. This sailor was uniquely immune to the nuances of modern color systems: incapable of seeing in modern colors.¹⁰³

At a broader level, British debates about defective color vision—in medical journals, Parliament, art criticism, and the popular press—articulated a range of concerns about the potentially disastrous relationship between labor and modernity. To what extent was there such a thing as “modern” vision, and in what degree was the British laborer expected to possess it? As the color systems of modernist painters gained notoriety, the color vision debates took on a new significance. Jonathan Crary has documented a growing awareness of the unreliability of perception in the nineteenth century: a shift from classical theories of vision (vision-as-mechanical) to modern (vision-as-non-veridical). The emergence of models of subjective vision, in which vision was characterized above all by flux, created the preconditions for the artistic experimentation that took place between the 1850s and the 1900s.¹⁰⁴

Color-blind workers were not only a threat to public safety, but also a challenge to an explicitly modernist sphere of aesthetic judgment.

In 1894, the ophthalmologist Freeland Fergus decided to administer the Holmgren test to his friend, the modernist artist George Henry. Henry was a brilliant colorist of the Glasgow Boys, a loosely knit group of Scottish West Coast painters who rose to international prominence in the 1880s. The purpose of this experiment was not to root out a dangerous worker, but to illustrate the artistic failings of the test. In the end, Henry pronounced the process of sorting wools to be impossible, and abandoned the project in disgust.¹⁰⁵

Fergus, who was also a navigator, concluded that a candidate (not a painter, but a sailor or railway man) might fail the test because he was too artistic: that is, because he was able to perceive affinities between colors, such as light pink and pale gray, that the medical eye might miss.¹⁰⁶ Fergus' findings are echoed in the private correspondence of leading ophthalmic authorities such as Edward Nettleship, who examined large numbers of Board candidates. Just after the conclusion of the Trattles case, Nettleship complained of “over-scrupulous” male examinees who were so “particular” about matching the test skein exactly that they caused the examiners much trouble; they failed to perform well on the Holmgren test despite having normal color vision.¹⁰⁷

Fergus's devaluation of the Holmgren test allowed for a reappraisal of “failed” examinees like Smith, Downes, and Trattles. Under the terms of Fergus' study, these candidates were neither color-stupid nor color-blind. Quite the opposite—they were possessed of an aesthetic judgment that surpassed that of their examiners. Where George Wilson had posited an army of industrial workers cursed with a blunted color sense, Fergus imagined a new tribe of Aesthetic laborers, victimized by a standardized exam that negated the individuality of their vision.

At the same time, art education manuals in Britain, France, and the United States referred to the now well-publicized phenomenon of color blindness in order to attack, or more rarely, to defend the current artistic restlessness.¹⁰⁸

The vast medico-legal literature on color blindness, previously structured around the pathological worker, was invoked at the turn of the century as a way of discrediting modernist visions of the world. The “color illusions” of the post-Impressionists—specifically, their non-representational use of color—were attributed to visual pathologies in the artists.¹⁰⁹ Studies of defective color vision in artists from Mulready to Turner offered a medical vocabulary for delimiting modernist revelations as pathological in themselves.

Within the British scientific community, the purpose of studying visual disorders was changing as well. During and after the First World War, color vision theorists turned from the problem of labor towards broader meditations on genetics. For example, members of Karl Pearson's Eugenics and Biometrics Laboratory referred to a crisis of “national ophthalmic degeneracy.” Here, the study of color blindness was important not because it could protect the British public from accidents, but because it could reveal the larger workings of hereditary mechanisms.¹¹⁰

Ophthalmic investigators like Edward Nettleship became deeply interested in color-blind women, believing that they would reveal the secrets of heredity.¹¹¹ Nettleship noted that color-blind women posed no risk to British industry; their sole significance was in relation to the laws of inheritance.

The science of color vision no longer focused exclusively on the regulation of labor. But the need for state intervention in the regulation of color blindness persisted through the First World War. The Board of Trade continued to order expensive new apparatuses for color vision testing, though their confidence in testing methods was clearly diminished.¹¹²

The Indian author P.G.S. Dubash argued in 1919 that color blindness was disturbingly prevalent in English children; again, more so in the metropole than in the outposts of Empire.¹¹³ He believed that color blindness was equal in preventability to rheumatism, mostly through abstaining from tobacco and alcohol. If color blindness could be reduced among the working classes, Dubash argued, then workers would better appreciate the appeal of Britain's greener rural environments. Urban crowding would be reduced, and immorality along with it. The prevention of color blindness thus remained a concern for Britain's highest governing bodies. But the war had produced its own variants of anomalous vision. Robert Henry Elliot, the superintendent of the Madras Government Ophthalmological Hospital, described a unique postwar phenomenon of collective color blindness. The Great War had “flung masses of men of the Anglo-Saxon race” into parts of the earth where they had been exposed to malarial fever, and thus quinine and its byproduct: color blindness.¹¹⁴ This diagnosis of new visual defects expressed a fundamental anxiety, anticipated in the nineteenth century, about the ways in which modern Britons might see, or fail to see, a new world.