The first written record of colour blindness may be attributed to Joseph Huddart in 1777. In his account, he described two brothers that had abnormal colour vision. He noted their difficulty in picking cherries (they found it difficult to distinguish the cherry from the leaves), their identification of an orange as green, and their frustration over why people had so many words to describe colours. It should be noted however that Huddart was not studying colour vision deficiency, and had simply published what he thought to be an oddity of a story.

Colour blindness however continued to go unrecognised in the scientific community (and at large) until 1798, when John Dalton (the same Dalton that pioneered atomoic theory) published his findings on the matter in his scientific paper Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours. Dalton himself was colour blind (he asked to preserve his eye in his will for study, with later examinations indicating he suffered from deuteranopia), and it was the discovery of this deficiency in himself that led him to research the matter.

I was never convinced of a peculiarity in my vision, till I accidentally observed the colour of the flower of the Geranium zonale by candlelight, in the Autumn of 1792. The flower was pink, but it appeared to me almost an exact sky-blue by day; in candle-light, however, it was astonishingly changed, not having then any blue in it, but being what I called red, a colour which forms a striking contrast to blue. Not then doubting but that the change of colour would be equal to all, I requested some of my friends to observe the phenomenon; when I was surprised to find they all agreed, that the colour was not materially different from what it was by day-light, except my brother who saw it in the same light as myself.

While Dalton is commonly credited as the "discoverer of colour blindness," another scientist in 1798, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's was also researching colour vision deficiency in relation to his larger colour theory.