John Dollond's Prismatic Experiments: The Beginning of a Long Way

The English optician John Dollond (1706-1761) performed a number of experiments with prisms of various transparent materials and concluded that an achromatic lens could exist. At that time, the dominant opinion about light refraction denied this possibility. This work presents the computer simulations of these experiments. Simulations allowed us to indicate the boundaries on an optical parameters of glasses, which could be used by J. Dollond in his prism experiments.