Touching colors: notes on the making of tact-similes

This article traces the origins and enduring afterlives of an anecdote, popularized by chemist Robert Boyle during the seventeenth century and claiming that a blind man might distinguish colors by touch. The story’s many retellings expose fantasies about the nonvisible and anxieties about the reliability of sight at a moment when empiricism and experimental science were redefining the role of the sensory perception in knowledge production. The essay places this imagined capacity alongside the work and experience of blind people, particularly through the work of Cambridge blind mathematician Dr Nicholas Saunderson (1683-1739). Reflecting on the author’s tactile reproductions of unpublished rainbow diagrams drawn by Saunderson’s students, the essay argues that the idea of “touching colors” draws attention to the embodied and discursive nature of visual phenomena.