ALTANA Liquid Color Standards Manual - Manual (Page 5)

4
General Information
Because liquid color standards first appeared over
50 years ago many old sets are still in use whose
colors do not exactly agree with each other, a brief
history of the Gardner Liquid Color Standards will
be helpful.
In the 1920‘s, several sets of colored liquids were
developed for use in describing the colors of
varnishes, resin solutions and drying oils. Of these,
the most widely used was a set made of ferric
chloride and cobalt chloride dissolved in hydro-
chloride acid, which was developed by Henry A.
Gardner. These standards were described in
ASTM D1544, Method of Test for Varnishes, and
were widely known as the Gardner 1933 Standards.
About the same time, the Hellige Company was
marketing a set of glass disks with designations
1, lL, 2, 2L, etc. Later, the Hellige Company shifted
over to marketing glass disks which presumably
matched the Gardner 1933 Standards.
In the late 1940‘s, a committee of the Intersociety
Color Council undertook the investigation of
various sets of color standards for liquids. As a
result of this, a revision of D1544 was drawn up
in which the lighter tubes (up to 8) were made with
potassium chloroplatinate, and all colors were
specified by the spectrophotometric color values
rather than by composition. This was published as
ASTM D1544-53.
In the design of this specification, a serious effort
was made to retain the colors described by
D1544 and the Gardner 1933 Standards, since
these had been widely adopted by the trade.
Unfortunately, it turned out that three of the tubes
(7, 8 and 9) were significantly lighter than the
accepted colors of the 1933 Standards, so these
tubes gave higher numbers than did the old tubes
General Information