Joseph Williams Lovibond

British brewer and inventor of colorimeter

Joseph Williams Lovibond (17 November 1833 – 21 April 1918) was a British brewer who developed the world's first practical colorimeter as a means of ensuring the high quality of his beer. He was the originator of the Degrees Lovibond scale.

Biography

After accidentally losing his earnings from gold mining as a teenager, Lovibond went to work in his family's brewery. He discovered that coloration was a good index for assessing the quality of beer, and sought an accurate way of gauging color. After failed experiments with paint, on solids, a visit to Salisbury Cathedral in 1880 gave him the inspiration to use stained glass for his colorimeter, which he introduced in 1885.^[1]

Business

In 1885 he founded a company, The Tintometer Limited,^[2] to manufacture his colorimeter which was called the Lovibond Comparator. The company still exists and still produces an updated version of the Lovibond comparator.

Publications

Measurement of Light and Colour Sensations: A New Method of Investigating the Phenomena of Light and Colour by Means of the Selective Absorption in Coloured Glass, Graded into Scales of Equivalent Colour Value. Gill. 1894.
Light and Colour Theories and Their Relation to Light and Colour Standardization. London: E. & F.N. Spon. 1915 – via Internet Archive.
The Genesis of Colour. [With Plates.]. The Tintometer. 1915.
The Tintometer: An Instrument for the Analysis, Accurate Measuring and Recording of All Colors (PDF). Tintometer Limited. 1904.^{[permanent dead link]}

Notes and references

^ Finlay 2007, p. 103.
^ Kuehni & Schwarz 2007, p. 212.

Kuehni, Rolf G.; Schwarz, Andreas (2007). Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Systems from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-804088-0.
Finlay, Victoria (2007). Color: A Natural History of the Palette. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-43083-0.
Fawcett, G S (1944). "Sixty years of colorimetry". Proceedings of the Physical Society. 56 (1): 8–21. Bibcode:1944PPS....56....8F. doi:10.1088/0959-5309/56/1/303. ISSN 0959-5309.
Lovibond, J.W. (5 May 1891), Patent for Tintometer