Lidded box containing groups of various colours of coloured worsted wool bundles; instruction inside lid.
Provenance
Collected by Dr. A. A. Travill for Queen's Faculty of Medicine.
Dates
1900
1910
circa 1900-1910
Inscriptions
No. 1370 // PROFESSOR HOLMGREN'S // WORSTED // TEST FOR COLOR BLINDNESS // ARRANGED AND MANUFACTURED // BY // American Optical Company // Southbridge Massachusetts U. S. A. // J. F. HARTZ CO. // PHYSCIANS SUPPLIES
Permanent Location
Storage Room 0010
0010-E4-7
Copy Type
Original
Research Facts
Students at the University of Toronto used the Holmgren Wool test for laboratory exercises. Physicians and laymen used the test primarily for the detection of colour-blind employees of railway and shipping lines. A set of instructions (most likely added at the University of Toronto)
were pasted inside the front lid of the container (see above). These instructions are very similar to a variation of Holmgren’s test designed by Dr. William Thomson, a Philadelphia ophthalmologist. The test kit consists of three test worsteds and forty match and confusion worsteds. The subject was asked to match the worsteds with the test wool. If she chose the confusion colours instead of the proper match colours, the subject was said to be colour blind. For example, with the Pink Test worsted, if the subject chose blue or violet, the subject would be termed red-blind. If she chose green or gray, the subject was said to be green-blind.
Fithiof Holmgren (1831-1897), the inventor of the above test, was a Swedish physiologist who made his reputation studying the retina’s electrical response to light. Early in his career, Holmgren studied under Herman von Helmholtz and Emil DuBois-Reymond. The success and popularity of Holmgren’s original test owed as much to his innovation as to the context of his work. Holmgren’s original test was directly inspired by a well-publicized railway accident at
Lagerlunda, Sweden, in 1876. Holmgren suspected that the engineer of the train suffered from colour-blindness and he set out to test this theory by examining 266 employees of the UppsalaGabole line. As he suspected, thirteen of these employees were found to be colour blind. Holmgren’s test quickly established itself as a systematic, reliable way of detecting colour blindness in railway and shipping employees.
The original Holmgren test of 1879 was the first successful attempt to standardize the detection of colour-blindness. Seebeck and Wilson had made a similar attempt in the 1850’s but their efforts were ignored and forgotten (Boring, 1942). Holmgren based his test on the Young-Helmholtz
theory of colour perception which stated that there were three sets of colour perceiving elements in the retina. According to the theory, a defect in one of these elements caused a variant of colour-blindness. Holmgen designed the test to require matching, rather than naming of colours.
The original test was more cumbersome than the kit used by U of T students; it had over 160 wools: 3 test colours, and 20 match and confusion colours, (8 shades each).
Dr. William Thomson* devised his test under similar circumstances. In 1879 the American overnment commissioned Thomson to devise a colour-blind test for railway and shipping mployees. Thomson worked to simplify Holmgren’s method so that a "non-professional" could onduct the testing and transmit the results to an expert for interpretation. In a series of variations to Holmgren’s test, Thomson reduced the number of matching colours, and numbered the worsteds.
Much of the success of the Holmgren-Thomson test can be attributed to the simplicity and portability of its design. This test represents one of the earliest examples of a psychological test used on a large group of people.