Shortly after this, another and fundamentally important report on a comparison of the Fechner and Munsell scales of luminous sensation value was made by Elliot Q. Adams (9).
1921-1930
In July 1921, A. E. O. Munsell, son of A. H. Munsell, after one year of medical school and just out of the U. S. Army, encouraged by his father’s friends, took over the active presidency of the Munsell Color Company. Headquarters were then at 220 Tremont Street in Boston. A few months later, J. J. Roy became business manager of the company. In October of 1921 the writer became associated with the company, and in November of 1921, F. A. Carlson joined the group in Boston.
Because New York seemed to be a center of educational activities, and because a program of expansion in the educational field was expected, the company, including on the staff the three mentioned above, moved to the Printing Crafts Building in New York City. There Milton E. Bond, artist, of Rochester, New York, was added to the permanent staff.
At this time, the business of the company consisted chiefly of sales of school supplies such as those already mentioned. Mr. Carlson’s work was to copy those sheets of Atlas papers in which supplies ran low. There were, for example, more calls for the “maxima” and “middle” colors than for any others, so extra copies of these particular papers had to be made up so as to fill orders for the complete series of papers in the Atlas. The color chips were pasted on the charts by hand—in fact, they still are, the papers being painted in large sheets, then cut to the required size.
From his earliest days with the company, A. E. O. Munsell was influenced in his thinking by Irwin G. Priest, then chief of the colorimetry section of the Bureau of Standards. Mr. Munsell was neither a businessman nor an artist. His interests lay rather in scientific fields, and, from the beginning, he left the handling of much of the business of the company to others, while he concentrated on the scientific aspects of the Munsell work. The writer’s first memory of A. E. O. Munsell is that of his enthusiasm upon his return from the 1921 meeting of the Optical Society of America where he had met and talked with I. G. Priest. It was at that meeting that he first heard of Carl W. Keuffel’s development of a direct-reading spectrophotometer, later described before the Optical Society by Mr. Keuffel. One was ordered on the spot and was delivered in New York to the Munsell Research Laboratory during the next year.
During 1922, artist tempera colors were produced for a brief period for the company by Martini, well-known maker of high grade artist tempera colors.
More and more, the burden of handling the details of a school supply business irked Mr. Munsell. There were no profits, so there was little interest and incentive for keeping on a business manager. Therefore, during the spring of 1923, arrangements were completed whereby the making and handling of Munsell crayons was turned over to the Binney and Smith Company, and the purchase and sale of all other Munsell school supplies, water colors, drawing papers, etc., was turned over to Favor, Ruhl and Company. The entire stock of such materials was cleared out of the Munsell stock room in New York City. The only things that the Munsell company itself intended to continue handling were the production and sale of Atlas papers, charts, disks, and Munsell publications.
About this time, the Munsell Research Laboratory came into being, supported by funds contributed by A. E. O. Munsell, his mother, Mrs. J. E. O. Munsell, and his sister, then Margaret Munsell. It was founded as a memorial to A. H. Munsell to carry forward the application of his particular contribution, namely; “a simple and practical notation, or method of writing color.” The employment of Milton E. Bond to produce posters, paintings, and other examples of Munsell-inspired works that could be used in art educational work, the purchase of a spectrophotometer, and of artificial daylighting, and the development of a small laboratory darkroom were all part of the research laboratory work. This work had only its beginning in New York City, for while there, all work that might be classified as “laboratory” was done by Mr. Munsell himself and by the writer, who, by way of being his secretary, was also his laboratory assistant.
