James Clerk Maxwell famously created the basis for Dr. Spencer's image in 1861 during a presentation to the Royal Institution of London. Maxwell himself was not interested in photography, but the physics of colour. Nevertheless, in collaboration with photographer Thomas Sutton (1819-1875) he sought out to prove that any colour could be created by mixing the colours blue, red and green. He commissioned Sutton to produce three black and white negatives, each to be photographed through red, green and blue filters. These three negatives would become known as ‘separation negatives’. They were then turned into positives and projected in superimposition through their respective coloured filter. The resulting projection was a full colour image and as if by accident, the path to colour photography was found.

In 1937, Dr. Spencer discovered that the original positive transparencies created by Sutton and used during the 1861 presentation were housed at Cambridge University. Using his own process, Vivex, introduced in 1928, he created the first phyiscal print of the tartan ribbon projection.