A bold proposal was advanced by William Schooling in an article published in The Nineteenth Century (July 1895). Although there is no evidence that an instrument actually was built, his suggestion to use vacuum tubes of various shapes is remarkable. Contacts on a keyboard would electrically activate individual tubes, and the intensity of illumination could be varied with a pedal to alter levels of current. It is not difficult to see this concept as a forerunner of present-day computer-controlled artistic or commercial lighting systems. They have become so prevalent that we now take them for granted.
The best-known color instrument of the last century was patented in 1893 by Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854-1918). The inventor, a professor of fine arts at Queen's College in London, called his apparatus the Colour-Organ, and this name has become the generic term for all such devices designed to project colored light. Rimington described his instrument and the color theories upon which it was based in a book entitled Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour (1911).
Rimington was convinced that physical analogies of some kind existed between