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Introduction Isaac Newton first discussed the coloured interference fringes that we now call Newton’s Rings in a communication to the Royal Society in December 1675. His book ‘Opticks’ further expanded on his ideas. The original observation was made with a wedge-shaped air-gap between the surfaces of two prisms, although the standard technique now is to press a convex surface of a lens against a flat glass plate. Newton discovered concentric coloured rings in the thin film of air between a lens and a flat sheet of glass. The distance between these concentric rings depended on the increasing thickness of the film of the air.[a] At the time numerous pieces of equipment were made to generate the interference patterns. The best device was made by a French optician, Duboscq. Newton’s rings demonstrate the wave-like nature of light (though Newton himself did not believe in the wave-like behaviour of light). [b] Because Newton opposed the wave theory of light, Huyghens superposition theory was not accepted until one hundred and fifty years later. The turning point in accepting the wave theory of light came in 1818 when Fresnel wrote a brilliant memoir on diffraction. [c] Theory Interference resul