By Vurdlak on September 13, 2011, with 103 Comments
This is one of my childhood’s favorite visual illusions, one you could literally have spent hours playing with! Unfortunately, back then I wasn’t aware it was invented by C.E. Benham, and that it already had a name – Benham’s Disk.
It was pretty popular back in the “old days”, as you could easily make your own unique spinner using nothing but piece of cardboard, a pencil and a toothpick! So what is so special about it? In 1894, toymaker Mr. C.E. Benham discovered that a spinning disk with a particular pattern of black and white marks could cause people to see colors! Mr. Benham called his disk an Artificial Spectrum Top and sold it through “Messrs, Newton and Co.”
Benham’s Top (or Benham’s Disk) has puzzled scientists for over 100 years. Let’s see if the spinning black and white disk can fool you into seeing some colors?! Do you think you can understand why is this happening? At some point, you should also be able to see a radiation warning sign inside the spinner!
(79 votes)
Bonus illusion: the “radiation symbol” pattern of the disk appears to slowly rotate to the right, while in fact it does not.
When you look at the spinning and then look away, the rotating is faster
I saw yellow then green and then yellow again
wow, I tried to relax my eyes and think it was all bright colors. I saw yellow glow and the black seemed like lighting! It keeps blinking, I mean the black part, though.
No colors here boss.
It took a while! But then I saw a red cicle rotating in the middle! :S
the only colors i see are blue and yellow
i think it is because of the frequencies of the light are moving so fast that they blend and make color
the frequencies didn’t blend, they separated into the different frequencies (colors) of visible light.
you see yellow and green more because they are in the center of the visible light spectrum.
I see a lime green, nothing else. I wonder what causes what colours you see?
Yellowish green and purple…
Am i the only one who saw purple!?
Saw purple!
I see nothing… Apart from a blinding white glow
I saw violet and green .. I didn’t see no yellow and I am not color blind