While others, like Roger Bacon and Aristotle, had observed rainbows and noted that sunlight could be broken down into colors, Newton's experiments were the first to systematically demonstrate the full visible light spectrum.
In 1666, Newton used a prism to split sunlight into its component colors, proving that white light is actually a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. He then recombined these colors using another prism, demonstrating that they could be recombined to produce white light again.
This experiment was crucial in understanding the nature of light and laid the foundation for the development of modern optics.
