The 300th anniversary of the publication of Isaac Newton's Opticks in 1704 provides an occasion to review the history of its composition and publication. As a preliminary to presenting that history, Newton's attitude to publication and response to criticism are examined. Newton's clashes with Hooke and his presumed role as the cause of the delay in the publication of the Opticks until after his death are also scrutinized. Rather than simply presenting Newton and Hooke as quarrelsome, which they indeed were, they are presented as rivals to be England's leading optical authority. Although Newton announced his intention to publish a book very much like the Opticks in the winter of 1675–76, he did not begin to write it until 1687. It was composed in various stages, including new experimental investigations, by 1692, except for the part on diffraction. A planned, but unfulfilled, revision of the part on diffraction was responsible for delaying its publication for a number of years.

Simon Schaffer has published a constructivist analysis of the acceptance of Newton’s theory of color that focuses on Newton’s experiments, the continual controversies over them, and his power and authority. In this article, I show that Schaffer’s account does not agree with the historical evidence. Newton’s theory was accepted much sooner than Schaffer holds, when and in places where Newton had little power; many successfully repeated the experiments and few contested them; and theory mattered more than experiment in acceptance. I also present an alternative account of the acceptance of Newton’s theory that shows that, despite criticism when it was first published in 1672, the theory, or parts of it, gradually came to be accepted by mathematical scientists—including Huygens and Leibniz—and Scottish natural philosophers by the time of the publication of the Opticks in 1704. On the Continent, it was coming to be accepted within a decade or so after its publication, that is, before 1716, when Newton replied to a challenge, purportedly by Leibniz, that Schaffer sees as the crucial conflict that at last gave Newton’s experiments their authority.