If you sprinkle a little table salt or baking soda into a candle flame, you get a bright yellow color for sodium. Potassium salts will give you a lavender flame while copper produces a blue flame. This process is one of the ways that firework manufacturers can change the color of their displays. By adding different chemical salts, they can get spectacular colors in the starburst patterns. Astronomers use devices called spectroscopes to look at the light from distant stars to determine what elements are present in them.
Students can conduct their own spectral analysis of the gases used in street lamps.
Using inexpensive diffraction gratings have students go out at night and look at a variety of different street lights. Using colored pencils, they are to draw the patterns they see through the grating for each light. Back in class, have them compare the different spectra and attempt to classify the different sources. Reuben Lucius Goldberg was born in San Francisco on July 4th 1883, he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering in 1904 and took a job designing sewer pipes for the city of San Francisco. After a few months, however, he grew tired of the work, and quit, to join the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle as a sports writer and cartoonist.