Chemist Gilbert N. Lewis remarked that "the two most profound scientific minds, among the people he had known, were those of E[lliot] Q Adams and Albert Einstein.
After graduation, Adams took a position with the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he worked with Irving Langmuir on problems dealing with heat transfer.
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.
Perhaps his best recognized effort was the book, coauthored with W. E. Forsythe, titled Fluorescent and Other Gaseous Discharge Lamps.