In 1917 Adams moved to Washington, D. C., to perform research in the Color Laboratory in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. From 1921-1949, when he retired, he worked for General Electric at Nela Park, East Cleveland, Ohio. He made a seminal contribution to color science in his 1942 paper, "X-Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry."E. Q. Adams, "X-Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry," Journal of the Optical Society of America, 32:3, p 168-173 (March, 1942). In this paper, he provides two models for perceptually uniform color spaces. One, which he termed "chromatic value," was the precursor of the modern CIELAB uniform color space; the other, which he termed "chromatic valence," was the direct ancestor of the Hunter Lab color space, and provided the elements of today's CIELUV. This paper showed how relatively simple transformations from XYZ of Munsell colors can have relatively uniform spacing of hue and chroma.
