"[Anthony] Lucas of Liege repeated Newton's experiments, and obtained Newton's result, except that he never could obtain a spectrum whose length was more than three and a half times its breadth. Newton... persisted in asserting that the image would be five times as long as broad... We now know that the dispersion, and consequently the length, of the spectrum, is very different for different kinds of glass, and it is very probable that the Dutch prism was really less dispersive than the English one. The erroneous assumption which Newton made in this instance, he held by to the last; and was thus prevented from making [another] discovery."
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Book IX, Ch. 3.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_optics
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History of optics
begins with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, followed by theories on light and vision developed by ancient Greek philosophers, and the development of in the Greco-Roman world. The word optics is derived from the Greek term τα ὀπτικά meaning "appearance or look". Optics was significantly reformed by the developments in the medieval Islamic world, such as the beginnings of physical and physiological optics, and then significantly advanced in early modern Europe
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