Robert Bunsen - Biography, Facts and Pictures Robert Bunsen Robert Bunsen’s Early Life and Education Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was born on March 30, 1811, in Göttingen, Germany. He was the youngest of four sons. His father was Christian Bunsen, professor of modern languages and head librarian at the University of Göttingen. His mother came from a military family. After he had become a famous professor, Bunsen once recalled that he had been a wayward child at times, but his mother kept him in line. He attended elementary school and high school in Göttingen. When he reached the age of 15 he moved to the grammar school in Holzminden, about 40 miles (60 km) from Göttingen. In 1828, aged 17, he started work for his degree at the University of Göttingen. He took courses in chemistry, physics and mathematics, with some geology and botany. He won an award for his work on a humidity meter. When he wrote this work up in 1830, he was awarded a Ph.D.

in chemistry – he was just 19 years old. Advertisements Bunsen stayed at Göttingen until he won a government scholarship to travel around Europe studying chemistry. He spend most of 1832 and 1833 learning chemical techniques in laboratories in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. In France he spent time in Paris working with the famous chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac. Recalling differences between his own time as a university student and many years later, Bunsen said: “In my day, we studied science and not, as now so often happens, only one of them.” Robert Bunsen’s Discoveries and Contributions to Science Arsenic – A Triumph and a Disaster In 1833, aged 22, Bunsen started working as a chemistry lecturer at the University of Göttingen. He had obtained his license to teach, but received no salary from the university. He tutored students and carried out research in the chemistry laboratories. In the early years of his career, Bunsen researched arsenic compounds – hazardous work. In 1834 he published his first important work – a triumph.

Working with the physician Arnold Berthold he discovered an antidote to arsenic poisoning. He found that adding iron oxide hydrate to a solution in which arsenic compounds are dissolved causes the arsenic compounds to fall out of the solution as ferrous arsenate, which is an insoluble, harmless solid. Bunsen developed an ongoing passion for studying the compounds of arsenic. Like the good chemist he was, he tried to take precautions against the toxic effects of these compounds, He devised a face mask with a breathing tube which ran outside to feed him clean air while he worked. Some arsenic compounds, however, are explosive. Without warning, they can explode in dry air. In 1843, nine years after finding the antidote to arsenic poisoning, Bunsen became a victim of such an explosion when a sample of an arsenic compound called cacodyl cyanide exploded, shattering his face mask and permanently blinding his right eye. The explosion also resulted in Bunsen suffering severe arsenic poisoning. He was saved from death by the iron oxide hydrate antidote he had discovered nine years earlier.

Invention of the Zinc-Carbon Battery In 1841 Bunsen invented the zinc-carbon cell – often called the Bunsen battery. He saw this as an improvement on the expensive Grove cell, which was used, for example, to power telegraph lines. The Grove cell was a zinc-platinum cell. The platinum in it made it very expensive. Bunsen combined his zinc-carbon cells into large batteries, which he used to isolate metals from their ores. He was the first person to produce large scale samples of pure magnesium metal. His replacement of expensive platinum with cheap carbon also allowed other researchers who had been deterred by costs to carry out work in electrochemistry. Gas Analysis and Big Wins for Industry Bunsen developed a variety of new techniques to analyze gases. Between 1838 and 1846 he used his methods to study gases produced by industries. He found that in the steel industry, where heat was produced by burning charcoal, much of the charcoal was not burning completely. It was burning to form carbon monoxide, rather than carbon dioxide, which produces much more heat. To improve efficiency, Bunsen recommended that the exhaust gases from burning charcoal should be recycled to generate more energy by burning them.

He estimated German furnaces were wasting 50 percent of their energy and British furnaces 80 percent. Eventually, the reluctant industries changed their ways and adopted Bunsen’s recommendations. An Expedition to Iceland – Bunsen Discovers how Geysers Operate Bunsen was interested in both gas analysis and geology. He was invited to Iceland in 1846 to study volcanic activity. The work he did made fundamental contributions to geochemistry. By bravely standing at the sides of geysers and lowering scientific apparatus into their depths, he discovered that geysers had at their base a reservoir of superheated water: this water is much hotter than 100 °C. It is kept liquid by high pressure below ground. As this water rises from below, the pressure falls, and the water boils explosively producing a geyser.

“The far northern scenery is absolutely desolate but is marvelously beautiful, and I shall never regret that I have seen it, even though it cost me the unbelievable privations and exertions which we suffer here.” Robert Bunsen The Bunsen Burner Chemists and alchemists before them were aware that if you sprinkled a sample of a substance into a flame, the color you saw helped you identify chemical elements in the sample. Lithium compounds, for example, burn with a rose-red flame, while potassium compounds burn with a lilac flame. This is seen in the chemistry of fireworks, where different colors are produced using salts of different elements. Bunsen had observed that sodium compounds gave an orange-yellow flame. However, the color of the flame itself, before any chemicals were sprinkled into it, could interfere with the test, making it unreliable. The Bunsen Burner Bunsen’s response was his gas burner. By introducing air into the gas in the correct proportion before it burns, a clean, soot-free, almost colorless flame is produced. Using his burner, Bunsen used flame tests to analyze substances much more reliably than ever before. The burners he designed were made by Peter Desaga, his laboratory assistant.

Bunsen published the design of the burner in 1857, but he did not patent his design. He did not wish to make profits from science; he believed the intellectual rewards were more than enough. His burner is now used not only for flame tests. It is used to heat samples and to sterilize equipment in medical laboratories all over the world. The Spectrometer and Discovery of New Elements Bunsen’s friend and colleague Gustav Kirchhoff was interested in the infant science of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy was the science of splitting sunlight into the colors of the rainbow using a prism – much as Isaac Newton did in 1666. A prism splits a beam of sunlight into a colored spectrum of light. Many years later, in 1802, William Hyde Wollaston repeated Newton’s experiment, but looked at a colored spectrum of sunlight using a magnifying glass. He saw more than the colors of the rainbow: he saw seven dark lines within the colors. In 1812, Josef Fraunhofer looked at a greatly magnified spectrum of colors from sunlight and saw over 500 of these dark lines.

(We now know there are more than 3000 lines.) Fraunhofer could not explain the lines. Fraunhofer saw dark lines when he magnified the spectrum of sunlight from a prism. Enter Gustav Kirchhoff. Bunsen had first met Kirchhoff and worked with him at the University of Breslau when he spent a year there in 1851. In 1852, Bunsen had taken the Chair of Chemistry at Heidelberg University. In 1854, he arranged that his friend Kirchhoff should follow him, to take the Chair of Physics. The pair then formed a highly productive research partnership. Kirchhoff was interested in the new science of spectroscopy. He wanted to explain the dark lines in the sun’s spectrum. He made the historic discovery that they were caused by cooler gases in the sun’s atmosphere absorbing particular wavelengths of sunlight. These dark-lined spectra are now called absorption spectra. In 1859, Kirchhoff and Bunsen brought together a spectroscope and a Bunsen burner to study spectra from Bunsen’s flame tests.

The two scientists looked at the spectra of a variety of different substances when they were in the hot flame of the Bunsen burner. The Bunsen-Kirchhoff Spectroscope with Bunsen Burner KEY: (A) Box, colored black on the inside; (B) & (C) Telescopes; (D) Bunsen Burner; (E) Sample Holder; (F) Prism; (G) Mirror; (H) Handle to rotate prism and mirror. The results were stunning. Bright lines appeared in the spectrum: the elements, when strongly heated in the Bunsen burner’s flame, emitted light at particular colors or wavelengths. These bright-lined spectra are now called emission spectra. Lines in the spectrum turned out to be a reliable ‘fingerprint’ for chemical elements. Every element absorbs or emits characteristic wavelengths of light, leading to different ‘fingerprints’ of lines for the different elements. Emission Spectrum of Hydrogen Emission Spectrum of Iron A new science had been born – chemical spectroscopy. Using their newly invented method, Bunsen and Kirchhoff discovered two new elements: cesium in 1860, and rubidium in 1861.

The beauty of spectroscopy is that tiny traces of a substance can be detected. This opened up a whole new field of chemical analysis where elements could be detected when their concentrations were exceptionally low. For example, Bunsen and Kirchhoff’s spectroscope revealed the new element cesium, even though there was only a tiny amount of cesium in the mineral water it was discovered in. In fact, when Bunsen tried to get a sample of the new element, he had to process 40 tons of mineral water to extract 50 grams of cesium salt from it. After Bunsen and Kirchhoff published their work, other scientists quickly realized the power of the new technology. This led to the discovery of more elements, including indium (1863), helium (1868), europium (1896), gallium (1875), and hafnium (1922). Kirchhoff was able to identify some of the elements that are present in our sun. Other scientists looked to the stars and discovered that they are made of exactly the same elements as we find in our sun and on our earth.

Today, spectroscopy encompasses all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just visible light. It is an enormously valuable method for solving a huge variety of scientific problems. Even living things can be analyzed with spectroscopy, such as when magnetic resonance spectroscopy is used to identify diseases in people. Invention of Flash Photography In 1864, Bunsen and his research student Henry Enfield Roscoe invented flash photography when they used the intense, bright light from burning magnesium as a light source to allow photographs to be taken in poor ambient light. The Man Bunsen never married and had no children. He had a reputation as a fun person to be around, full of laughter, but not too careful about his personal appearance – he had better uses for his time than wasting it over selecting clothes and looking at himself in the mirror. Another professor’s wife once said that she would like to kiss him, but she would have to wash him first! He was a person who had a great reputation for warmheartedness, and enjoying jokes and fun. His students admired him greatly. He told a great many anecdotes. These were published after his death in a short book called Bunseniana.

His work with arsenic, and with poisonous gases, his study of explosive chemical reactions, and his willingness to take equipment into the craters of active volcanoes and to lower it into geysers suggests he enjoyed living dangerously. In 1868 there was another explosion in his laboratory. This one involved iridium and rhodium metal powders, which can ignite spontaneously in air. Bunsen wrote: “It is still difficult for me to write, as my hands are not quite healed… on touching the finely divided metal… with my finger, the whole suddenly exploded with the energy of rammed-in gunpowder… My left hand… saved my eyes, as my face and eyes were only superficially burnt by the flames which penetrated through my fingers. My eyes are, with the exception of singed eyebrows and eyelashes, unhurt, and so the explosion will luckily leave behind no serious traces.” One of Bunsen’s favorite activities was walking in the woodland and hills around Heidelberg – here he got time to think. On these walks, he said, his best ideas would come to him. Bunsen did a great deal of his laboratory work personally.

He was a skilled glass blower, and he preferred doing experiments to anything else science could offer him. “As an investigator he was great, as a teacher he was greater, as a man and friend he was greatest.” Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, 1833 – 1915 Chemist Awards Bunsen worked in pre-Nobel prize days. In 1860 he was awarded the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in the form of the British Royal Society’s Copley Medal; he also won the Royal Society’s Davy Medal in 1877. He was elected foreign member of the Royal Society, and in 1883 became one of eight foreign members of the French Academy of Sciences. The End Robert Bunsen died on August 16, 1899 in Heidelberg, aged 88. Advertisements Author of this page: The Doc Images of Robert Bunsen enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved. Please use the following MLA compliant citation: "Robert Bunsen." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 23 Sep. 2014. Web.

< Robert Bunsen Biography (1811-1899) Robert Bunsen Biography (1811-1899) Occupation chemist Robert Bunsen is best known for his invention of the improved gas flame device which bears his name: the Bunsen burner. However, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen's contributions to science extend far beyond this one invention; he developed a number of other common laboratory instruments, as well as a new device and process for analyzing the elemental constituents of chemicals called spectroscopy. This new science, developed with Gustav Kirchhoff, is probably his most important legacy to science. Bunsen received his doctorate in 1830 from the University of Göttingen, in his hometown. His high marks earned him a grant from the Hanoverian government and with those funds he traveled toBerlin, Bonn, Paris, and Vienna during the next three years. At each stop hemet with the cities' great thinkers and toured their centers of industry.

Upon his return to Göttingen he was made an instructor at the university;his stay there was brief, however, and he taught at several other German universities until 1852, when he settled into a professorship at the University of Heidelberg. During the years before Heidelberg, Bunsen's research efforts were concentrated in the field of organic chemistry, particularly in the studyof arsenic and its compounds. Though his studies yielded some advances, suchas the discovery of an antidote for cyanide poisoning, he abandoned this research when an explosion of cacodyl cyanide in 1843 cost him his right eye. Adetermined scientist, Bunsen applied his talents toward inorganic chemistry and the behavior of inorganic gases. He observed heated gases in geysers and furnaces and published his only book as a compilation of his gas research findings. At this time he began the work that would ultimately lead him to the discovery of spectroscopy. Bunsen had become interested in the chemical properties of alkali metals, such as barium and sodium. In order to isolate these elements, he invented new types of galvanic and carbon-zinc batteries (many ofwhich are still called Bunsen batteries).

To properly analyze the elements, he constructed a very sensitive ice calorimeter, measuring the volume of melted ice, rather than the mass. In 1851, while visiting the University at Breslau, Bunsen developed a working friendship with Gustav Kirchhoff, then an instructor at Breslau. Kirchhoff shared his interest in the properties of chemicals, and in 1854 Bunsen persuaded Kirchhoff to transfer to the University of Heidelberg. Together, they began research on the spectral emission of elements.In their experiments, an element was superheated or burned, so that the color of its flame could be observed. Unfortunately, even the best gas burner ofthe time imparted a glow from its flame that crept into the element's spectrum, skewing the scientists' findings. Bunsen was again forced to invent equipment whose precision would match that of his own research. Working with a design used by Michael Faraday, Bunsen made improvements that resulted in the modern laboratory burner, a device which produces a very hot, nearly invisible flame. Using this tool, Bunsen and Kirchhoff went on to pioneer the science ofspectroscopy.

Over the course of his career, Bunsen also invented a grease-spot photometer (used for measuring light), a process for mass-producing magnesium, a laboratory filter pump for washing precipitate samples, and a steam calorimeter. Bunsen died in 1899. User Contributions: Robert Bunsen, Scientist • Biography & Facts Robert Bunsen Scientist Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (30 March 1811[N1] – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with Gustav Kirchhoff . Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and Kirchhoff. Personal facts Who is Robert Bunsen? (with picture) Hobbies Who is Robert Bunsen?

Last Modified Date: 24 December 2016 Copyright Protected: Adorable animal families that will make you "aww" Robert Bunsen is best known for one of his more minor contributions to the field of science, the Bunsen burner , even though his lifetime of work yielded many more important, albeit less publicized, contributions. Born Robert Wilhelm Bunsen on 31 March 1811 in Göttingen, Germany, he was a modest, unassuming man of incredible intelligence. His contributions span several scientific disciplines, including chemistry, organic chemistry , geology , photochemical studies and spectrography. Bunsen began his studies in chemistry, and received his doctorate at 19 years of age in Germany. After graduation, he took a job lecturing and traveled throughout Europe to study advancements in manufacturing, geology and chemistry. One of his first breakthroughs was in organic/physiological chemistry when he discovered the use of iron oxide hydrate as an antidote for arsenic poisoning. In 1838, he began teaching at the University of Marlsburg, where he studied cacodyl, a compound made with arsenic.

These experiments proved to be very dangerous and life threatening, and the substance nearly poisoned Bunsen, and an explosion in his lab took his sight in one eye. Later, Robert Bunsen turned his interests to blast furnaces in Germany and Britain. He noticed that the furnaces were losing significant heat in the process — anywhere from 50 to 80%. He collaborated with fellow scientist , Lyon Playfair, and together they devised a technique to recycle the heat, making them more efficient. He also invented a carbon electrode to improve the batteries in use at the time. Although Bunsen was very successful in his work with organic chemistry, he discovered that he favored the field of geology. He spent time analyzing volcanic rock and gases in Iceland, and tested currently held theories on geysers. Where the scientist would make the biggest impact in the scientific world was in his photochemical studies. During his study in spectroscopy , the study of the rays in light, he invented the Bunsen-Kirchoff spectroscope . He eventually discovered two new elements, cesium and rubidium. Thanks to his spectroscope, other scientists subsequently discovered other new elements.

As for his most famous namesake, the Bunsen burner, in reality, it was merely his concept, and he did not in actuality design it. Peter Desaga used Bunsen’s concept — pre-mixing gas and air before combusting it to give the burner a hotter burning, and nonluminous flame — and created the device that carries his name. Robert Bunsen was inducted into the Chemical Society of London in 1842 and the Academies des Sciences in 1853. During his lifetime, he would receive many other honors and distinctions. Upon retiring at the age of 78, Bunsen went back to the study of geology, a field that gave him much enjoyment. He passed away 16 August 1899, unmarried, but loved and admired by a great many colleagues. Ad Robert Wilhelm Bunsen facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (b Göttingen, Germany, 31 March 1811; d. Heidelberg, Germany, 16 August 1899) Chemistry.

Bunsen was the youngest of four sons born to Christian Bunsen, chief librarian and professor of modern languages at the University of Göttingen. His ancestors on his father’s side had lived in Arolsen, where many of them held public office, frequently as master of the mint; his mother was the daughter of a British-Hanoverian officer named Quensel. Bunsen began school in Göttingen but transferred to the Gymnasium at Holzminden, from which he graduated in 1828. Returning to Göttingen, Bunsen entered the university, where he studied chemistry physics, mineralogy, and mathematics. His chemistry teacher was Friedrich Stromeyer, who had discovered cadmium in 1817. Bunsen received his doctorate in 1830, presenting a thesis in physics: “Enumeratio ac descriptio hygrometrorum”. Aided by a grant from the Hanoverian government, Bunsen toured Europe from 1830 to 1833, visiting factories, laboratories, and places of geologic interest. In May 1832, he saw a new steam engine in K. A.

Henschel’s machinery factory in Kassel. Later that year, in Berlin, he studied Christian Weiss’s geognostic and mineralogic collections; met Freidlieb Runge, the discoverer of aniline, and Gustav Rose; and worked in Heinrich Rose’ laboratory. He visited Justus Liebig in Giessen and met Eilhard Mitcherlich in Bonn for a geological trip through the Eifel Plateau. In September 1832, Bunsen arrived in Paris. There he worked in Gay-Lussac’s laboratory and met such prominent scientists as Jules Reiset, Henri-Victor Regnault, Théophile Pelouze, and César Despretz. While in France, Bunsen visted the porcelain works at Sèvres. From May to July 1833, he traveled to Vienna, where he toured several industrial plants. In the fall of 1833 Bunsen became Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen. He succeeded Friedrich Wöhler at the Polytechnic School in Kassel in January 1836.

In October 1838 he was appointed professor extraordinarius of chemistry at the University of Marburg and became professor ordinarius four years later. Bunsen spent part of 1851 at Breslau, where he became acquainted with Gustav Kirchhoff, with whom he later did important research in spectroscopy. In 1852 he succeeded Leopold Gmelin at the University of Heidelberg. Although offered a position as Mitscherlich’s successor at the University of Berlin in 1863, Bunsen remained at Heidelberg until he retired in 1889, at the age of seventy-eight. A laboratory, constructed for him by the government of Baden, was completed in the summer of 1855; there Bunsen did his research and guided the work of numerous young men who became well-known scientists during the second half of the nineteenth century. Bunsen never married; his teaching and research consumed most of his time, and he traveled widely, either alone or with friends. Bunsen was a most devoted teacher. He presented 100 hours of lectures during each of seventy-four semesters in a course entitled “Allgemeine Experimentalchemie”.

The lectures, which changed little through the years, were concerned with inorganic chemistry; organic chemistry was excluded. Theoretical aspects were at a minimum: neither Avogadro’s hypothesis nor the periodic law of the elements–developed by his own students, Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer–was mentioned. In his research, as in his teaching, Bunsen emphasized the experimental side of science. He enjoyed designing apparatus and, being a skilled glassblower, he frequently made his own glassware. He was also an expert crystallographer. Bunsen developed and improved several pieces of laboratory equipment, including the Bunsen burner, the Bunsen battery, an ice calorimeter, a vapor calorimeter, a filter pump, and a thermopile. A man of wide scientific interests, Bunsen did some early research in organic chemistry but later abandoned this field and concentrated on inorganic chemistry. His most important work was the development of a variety of analytical techniques for the identification, separation, and measurement of inorganic substances., Throughout his life Bunsen gave much attention to geology. He was also interested in the application of experimental science to industrial problems.

His first research was on the insolubility of metal salts of arsenious acid, carried out in 1834. While involved in this work, Bunsen discovered that hydrated ferric oxide could be used as an antidote for arsenic poisoning. The ferric oxide is effective, he explained, because it combines with arsenic to form ferrous arsenite, a compound insoluble in both water and body fluids. This finding, still used today, was Bunsen’s only venture into physiological chemistry. In other early research, he analyzed a sample of allophane, an aluminum silicate, taken from a lignite bed near Bonn. In 1835 and 1836 Bunsen set forth the compositions and crystal measurements of a new series of double cyanides, showing, for example, that ammonium ferrocyanide and potassium ferrocyanide are isomorphous. He also discovered the double salt of ammonium ferrocyanide and ammonium chloride. Bunsen’s only work in organic chemistry was an investigation of compounds of cacodyl, an arsenic-containing organic compound, the results of which appeared in five papers published between 1837 and 1842.

In 1843, Bunsen lost the use of his right eye in an explosion of cacodyl cyanide. The first known cacodyl compound, alkarsine, had been prepared in 1760 by L. C. Cadet de Gassicourt, by distilling a mixture of dry arsenious oxide and potassium acetate. Alkarsine is a highly reactive, poisonous, spontaneously inflammable substance having heavy brown fumes and a nauseating odor. Its chemical composition was shown by Bunsen to be C4H12As2O, as Berzelius had suggested. Berzelius called the compound kakodyl oxide (from the Greek κακóδηs, “stinking”). Bunsen conducted a detailed study of cacodyl derivatives, obtaining the chloride, iodide, cyanide, and fluoride by reacting concentrated acids with the oxide. Using vapor density techniques, he determined the molecular formulas of the derivatives and realized that the cacodyl radical, C4H12As2, was preserved as an “unchangeable member” through the numerous reactions. This conclusion supported the radical theory of organic compounds advocated by Liebig and Berzelius.

Bunsen put forth further evidence for the radical theory when he isolated the free radical by heating the chloride with zinc in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. After presenting his papers, Bunsen withdrew from the controversy over the merits of the radical theory and turned to inorganic chemistry. It remained for his students, Adolph Kolbe and Edward Frankland, to show in 1853 that cacodyl compounds contain dimethylarsenic, As(CH3)2, and for Auguste Cahours and Jean Riche to demonstrate that free cacodyl is As2(CH3)4. Finally, in 1858 Adolph von Baeyer, another of Bunsen’s students, clarified the relationships among the members of the cacodyl series. Between 1838 and 1846, Bunsen developed methods for the study of gases while he was investigating the industrial production of cast iron in Germany and, in collaboration with Lyon playfair, in England.

He demonstrated the inefficiency of the process; in the charcoal-burning German furnaces, over 50 percent of the heat of the fuel used was lost in the escaping gases; worse, in the coal-burning English furnaces, over 80 percent was lost. Valuable by-products, such as ammonia, went unrealized and were among the gases lost to the atmosphere. Further, it was accidentally discovered that potassium cyanide was formed from potassium carbonate and atmospheric nitrogen at high temperatures. In an 1845 paper, “On the Gases Evolved From Iron Furnaces With Reference to the Smelting of Iron,” Bunsen and Playfair suggested techniques that could recycle gases through the furnace, thereby utilizing heat otherwise lost. They also dicussed ways by which valuable escaping materials could be retrieved Bunsen compiled his research on the phenomena of gases into his only book, Gasometrische Methoden (1857). This work brought gas analysis to a level of accuracy and simplicity reached earlier by gravimetric and titrimetric techniques. Dividing the book into six parts.

Bunsen presented methods of collecting, preserving, and measuring gases; techniques of eudiometric analysis; new processes for determining the specific gravities of gases; results of investigations on the absorption of gases in water and alcohol using asn absorptiometer he himself had devised; and results of experiments on gaseous diffusion and combustion. On the problem of gaseous absorption, Bunsen, assisted by several students, showed the experimental limits within which Henry’s law of pressures and Dalton’s law of partial pressures are valid. Greatly interested in geology, Bunsen accompanied a scientific expedition to lceland in 1846, the year after the eruption of the volcano Hekla. The expedition, sponsored by the Danish government, lasted three and one-half months and included Sartorius von Waltershausen and Bergmen, both from Marburg, and Alfred DesCloizeaux, a French mineralogist. Bunsen collected gases emitted from the volcanic openings and studied the action of these gases on volcanic rocks. He performed extensive chemical analyses of eruptive rocks, insisting that instead of determining what minerals were in a rock, the chemical composition of the rock as a whole should be ascertained.

Bunsen concluded that volcanic rocks are mixtures, in varying proportions, of two exteme kinds of rock; one kind acidic and rich in silica (trachytic). The other kind basic and less rich in silica (Pyroxenic). He thought that the formation of different kinds of rock could be traced to their differences in meltingpoint behavior under pressure. Although this explanation is no longer accepted, his observations contributed a great deal to the development of modern petrology. Bunsen also explored geysers, and at the Great Geyser made daring temperature measurements at several depths shortly before it erupted. He found that the temperature of water in the geyser tube, although high, did not reach the boiling point for a particular depth and corresponding pressure. He concluded that the driving force for eruption is supplied by steam that enters the tube under great presure from volcanic vents at the bottom. As the steam lifts the column of water, the effective pressure above the water is reduced. This change in the water’s depth results in a lowering of the boiling point and enables the already not water to boil. Through the 1840’s and 1850’s Bunsen made a number of improvements in the galvanic battery.

In 1841 he made a battery, known since as the Bunsen battery, with carbon, instead of the more expensive platinum or copper, as the negative pole. To prevent disintegration of the carbon pole by the nitric acid electrolyte, Bunsen treated the carbon, a mixture of coal and coke, with high heat. Forming a battery from forty-four subunits. Later, the made a battery with zinc and carbon plates in chromic acid. In 1852 Bunsen began to use electrochemical techniques to isolate pure metals in qauantities sufficient for determining their physical and chemical properties. He pressed magnesium into wire and used it as a light source in his subsequent photochemical experiments. Commercial manufacture of magnesium was also undertaken and the element came into general use as a brilliant illuminating agent. In the mid-1850’s Bunsen prepared sodium and aluminium from their molten chlorided. With the assitance of Augustus Matthiessen, Bunsen isolated lithium and several alkaline earth metals-barium, calcium, and strontium-from their fused chlorides. Bunsen, with William hillebrand and T.H.

Norton, prepared the rare earth metals of the cerium group-cerium, lanthanum, and didymium. To obtain the specific heats of these rare elements, Bunsen devised a sensitive ice calorimeter that measured the volume rather than the mass of the ice melted and requried only a small sample of the metal. From the specific heats, the atomic weights of these elements and the formulas of their compounds were calculated. Finally, the Bunsen battery made possible the electrolysis of a variety of organic compounds and the isolation of organic radicals by Kolbe and Frankland, who began their work under Bunsen’s direction in Marburg. Between 1852 and 1862 Bunsen collaborated with Sir Henry Roscoe on photochemical research involving the chemical combination of equal volumes of hydrogen and chlorine when they were illuminated. For this experiment they altered a reaction vessel devised by John Draper in 1843. Bunsen and Roscoe found that for some time after the experiment started—a time they called the induction period—no reaction took place; then the reaction rate slowly increased until a constant rate, Proportional to the intensity of the light source used, was reached.

The effect of the incident light was related to the wave- length and followed a law of inverse squares. Further, the illumination of chlorine alone before it entered the reaction chamber did not alter the length of the induction period. While variations of temperature within the range 18°–26° had little effect on the reaction, the presence of oxygen appeared to have a catalytic effect. Bunsen and Roscoe determined that the energy of the light radiated by the sun in one minute is equivalent to the energy needed for the conversion of 25 & 1012 cubic miles of a hydrogen-chlorine mixture into hydrogen chloride. Bunsen developed his well-known burner during the 1850’s, building upon the inventions of Aimé Argand and Michael Faraday. The Bunsen burner, with its nonluminous flame, quickly supplanted the blowpipe flame in the dry tests of analytical chemistry. Bunsen used his burner to identify metals and their salts by their characteristic colored flames. Other experiments with the burner yielded data for melting points and rate of volatility of salts. In the 1860’s Bunsen and Kirchhoff worked together to develop the field of spectroscopy.

Kirchhoff realized in 1859 that when colored flames of heated materials, which usually give bright, sharp emission spectra, are placed in the path of an intense light source, they absorb light of the same wavelength that they otherwise emit, and produce characteristic absorption spectra. Bunsen saw that analyses of absorption spectra could be made in order to determine the composition of celestial and terrestrial matter. He further predicted that spectral analysis could aid in the discovery of new elements that might exist in too small quantities or be too similar to known elements to be identifiable by traditional chemical techniques. Spectral analysis led to Bunsen and Kirchhoff’s announcement in 1860 of a new alkali metal, cesium, detected in a few drops of the alkaline residue from an analysis of mineral water obtained from Durkheim. The element was named cesium (from the Latin caesius, “sky blue”) because of its brilliant blue spectral lines. Cesium salts had previously been mistaken for compounds of potassium. The following year the element rubidium (from the Latin rubidus, “darkred”)was detected from the spectrum of a few grains of the mineral lepidolite.

By comparison, forty tons of mineral water were needed to yield 16.5 grams of cesium chloride and rubidium chloride that could be used in the chemical investigation of the compounds of these new elements. In 1862 Bunsen succeeded in isolating metallic rubidium by heating a mixture of the carbonate and charcoal. During the yeaars that followed, several other elements were identified by spectroscopic methods: thallium (Crookes, 1861), indium (Reich and Richter, 1863), gallium (Lecoq de Boisbaudran, 1875), scandium (Nilson, 1879), and germanium (Winkler, 1886). Bunsen was concerned with a variety of additional analytic work. In 1853 he developed a technique for the volumetric determination of free iodine using sulfurous acid. In 1868 he worked out methods for separating the several metals—palladium, ruthenium, iridium, and rhodium—that remain in ores after the extraction of platinum; as part of this project Bunsen constructed a filter pump for washing precipitates.

With the assistance of Victor Meyer, he conducted a government–sponsored study of the mineral water of Baden; results were published in 1871. He described the spark spectra of the rare earths in 1875. Late in his life Bunsen used a steam calorimeter that he had built to measure the specific heats of platinum, glass, and water. Bunsen was honored by several European scientific societies. In 1842 he was elected a foreign member of the Chemical Society of London. He became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in 1853, and a foreign member in 1882. He was named a foreign fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1858 and received its Copley Medal in 1860; Bunsen and Kirchhoff received the first Davy Medal in 1877. Finally, Bunsen’s scientific contributions to industry were recognized by the English Society of Arts, which awarded him the Albert Medal in 1898. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Original Works.

Bunsen’s Writings include Gasometrische Methoden (Brunswick, 1857; enl. ed., 1877), trans. by Henry E. Roscoe as Gasometry; Comprising the Leading Physical and Chemical Properties of Gases (London, 1857); Photochemical Researches, 5 Pts. (London, 1858–1863), written with Henry E. Roscoe and pub. in German as Photochemische Untersuchungen (Leipzig, 1892); Chemische Analyse durch Spectralbeobachtungen (Vienna, 1860), written with Kirchhoff; and Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Wilhelm Ostwald and Ernst Bodenstein, eds., 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1904). Also of interest, all in Klassiker der exacten Wissenschaften, are Untersuchungen über die Kakodylreihe, Adolf von Baeyer, ed., no. 27; and Photo-chemische untersuchungen, W. Ostwald, ed., nos. 34, 38. II. Secondary Literature.

Works on Bunsen are Theodore Curtin’s article in Eduard Farber, Great Chemists (New York, 1961), pp. 575–581, a trans. from Journal für praktische Chemie (1900); O. Fuchs’s article in F. D. G. Bugge, Das Buch der grossen Chemiker, II (Berlin, 1930), 78–91; Georg Lockemann, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. Lebensbild eines deutschen Forschers (Stuttgart, 1949); Ralph E. Oesper, “Robert Wilhelm Bunsen,” in Journal of Chemical Education, 4 (1927), 431–439; W. Ostwald’s article in Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie, 7 (1900), 608–618; J.R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, IV (London, 1964), 281–293;H.

Rheinboldt, “Bunsens Vorlesung über allgemeine Experimentalchemie,” in Chymia, 3 (1950), 223–241; Henry E. Roscoe, “Bunsen Memorial Lecture” (delivered 29 Mar.1900), in Journal of the Chemical Society, 77, pt. I (1900), 513–554; and Bunseniana. Eine Sammlung von humoristischen Geschichten aus den Leben von Robert Bunsen (Heidelberg, 1904). Susan G. Schacher Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA (b. Göttingen, Kingdom of Westphalia, 30 March 1811; d. Heidelberg, Germany, 26 August 1899) chemistry, analytical chemistry, spectroscopy. For the original article on Bunsen see DSB, vol. 2. Bunsen is best remembered for inventing and teaching methods that were crucial to the development of nineteenth-century analytical chemistry—above all those on gasometry, photochemical induction, and spectral analysis.

Furthermore, he made important improvements in instrumental techniques and had a sincere interest in geological matters. A good description of these topics is given in the original DSB article, though some of the dates are incorrect. Drawing on subsequent research, some of the stations of Bunsen’s life and work are recapitulated. In addition, a fuller assessment of Bunsen’s interdisciplinary research practices and his involvement in political matters are provided. Career Path. Bunsen was born into a Protestant bourgeois family from the middle of what is modern day Germany. His father, at once professor of physical geography, rhetoric, Spanish, and Italian and sub-librarian at the University of Göttingen, worked hard to feed his family. But raising four sons and funding their studies (the eldest son, Carl, died in an accident when he was seventeen years old) left the finances running low. Unlike his brothers, Bunsen studied not law but sciences and mathematics. Among his teachers were such prominent scientists as Friedrich Stromeyer, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Wilhelm Weber, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann, and Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut.

When only twenty years old, Bunsen received his doctor’s degree for a thesis originally written—and awarded— as an answer to the yearly announced Preisfrage (essay competition) of the philosophical faculty. His final exams took place in September 1831. In May 1832 Bunsen departed on a fifteen-month grand tour through Germany, France, Switzerland, Tyrol, and Austria. Subsequently he started to work on ammonia cyano compounds for his Habilitation in January 1834. Together with the physician Arnold Adolph Berthold, he then began research on iron oxide as an antidote to arsenic acid, the first in a number of successful interdisciplinary projects. In April 1834 he took up a lectureship as a Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen. After Stromeyer’s death in August 1835, he took over the main lecture until Friedrich Wöhler succeeded him. In return, in April 1836 Bunsen followed Wöhler as teacher at the vocational school (Höhere Gewerbeschule) in Kassel.

Here he began to work on organo-arsenic compounds and continued this work, despite a bad accident in November 1836 which damaged his right eye, after being appointed professor of chemistry in Marburg in 1839. Due to his increasing scientific reputation, built above all on his new gasometrical methods, Bunsen received a full professorship in 1841. Early in his career he developed an ongoing interest in technical-analytical questions, which was to play a significant role in linking his various research interests throughout his life. In April 1851 Bunsen succeeded to Nikolaus Wolfgang Fischer’s chair in Breslau. There he lectured on organic chemistry for the last time. In later years, his teaching focused on inorganic chemistry. Select parts of organic chemistry, however, were implemented in his experimental teaching. In the fall of 1852 he moved to Heidelberg as professor at the philosophical faculty and as director of the chemical laboratory. At the same time he received the title of Hofrath.

Main achievements of his career in Heidelberg were the photochemical research undertaken with Henry Enfield Roscoe from 1853 onward, and the scientific foundation of spectral analysis together with Gustav Robert Kirchhoff in 1859–1860. While the scientific and technical significance of Bunsen’s work is generally accepted, the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation in it is frequently underestimated. Particularly the great inventions in photochemistry and spectroscopy would not have been possible, had he not been part of the well-developed experimental culture in Heidelberg at that time, the main features of which were the application of physical methods to chemical and physiological questions and the transfer of methods across disciplinary boundaries by means of scientific instruments. Social Context. Subsequent research has shown that the emergence of this specific cultural setting was the result of both Baden’s successful science policy, and Bunsen’s own role in deliberately using academic employment policy for the creation of interdisciplinary networks. The nucleus of the Heidelberg network was built by Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Hermann von Helmholtz, Leo Königsberger, and, later on, Hermann Kopp.

Their achievements, however, depended on the services and know-how of a group of assistants, instrument makers, mechanics and draftsmen, for example, the famous Munich instrument maker Carl August von Steinheil, who supplied the lenses for the first spectrometer, or Heidelberg’s university mechanic Peter Desaga, who provided Bunsen’s laboratory with the famous burners and whose company, later on, specialized in Bunsensche Apparate, or the almost anonymous painter Friedrich Veith, whose pencil drawings of instruments were used for publications. Little is known about Bunsen’s political, and even less about his religious, position. But from his letters, from his actions and social relationships an antireactionary attitude can be inferred. Even though Bunsen played no active role in politics, Roscoe described him as a “staunch Liberal” (Roscoe, 1900, p. 552). While earlier research characterized Bunsen as apolitical, or, at best, hostile to Prussian politics, later research highlights his being part of a close network of liberal and politically active scholars such as Ludwig Häusser and Georg Gottfried Gervinus.

Furthermore three of Bunsen’s cousins, Gustav, Georg, and Karl Bunsen were active in the Vormärz era. Bunsen’s letters, especially those to his favorite pupil and friend Roscoe—in his later years a liberal member of Parliament for Manchester South—show him as a well-informed spectator of international politics who was well aware of the impact of political events upon university life and who knew how to interpret them for local purposes such as university politics. Thus it is by no means coincidental that Bunsen followed vocations from universities in more liberal states whenever the situation at his prior institution was worsening, a strategy that clearly demonstrates the close relationship between the careers of single scientists and science politics in the different territories of nineteenth-century Germany, which were competing for cultural excellence. BIBLIOGRAPHY Important archival resources lie in the Deutsches Museum Munich, Germany (foremost letters to colleagues), and the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Germany (a part of his literary remains, and some pupils’ notes on Bunsen’s lectures). Boberlin, Ursula. Photochemische Untersuchungen von R. Bunsen und H. Roscoe im Vergleich mit den Arbeiten J. W.

Drapers und W. C. Wittwers. Die Anfänge der quantitativen Photochemie im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Köster, 1993. Borscheid, Peter. Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden (1848–1914). Stuttgart: Klett, 1976. HobHitzel, Stephanie Brigitte. “Es lebt sich himmlisch in Heidelberg.” Robert Wilhelm Bunsen und seine Korrespondenz. PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 2003. Not in all aspects reliable. James, Frank A. L. J. “Science as a Cultural Ornament: Bunsen, Kirchhoff and Helmholtz in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Baden.” Ambix 42 (1995): pt. 1, 1–9. Jungnickel, Christa, and Russell McCormmach. “Kirchhoff and Helmholtz at Heidelberg: Relations of Physics to Chemistry and Physiology.” In Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein.

Volume 1: The Torch of Mathematics, 1800–1870, by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Roscoe, Henry Enfield. The Life & Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, Written by Himself. London: Macmillan, 1906. Roscoe, Henry Enfield. “Bunsen Memorial Lecture.” Journal of the Chemical Society 77 (1900): pt. 1, 513–554. Stock, Christine. Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz vor dem Antritt der Heidelberger Professur (1852) – Kritische Edition. PhD diss., University of Marburg, 2005. (To be published by Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Stuttgart, series “Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie,” in 2007.) Tuchman, Arleen Marcia. Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany. The Case of Baden, 1815–1871.

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Christine Nawa Robert Bunsen did a whole lot more than invent the Bunsen burner | Science | The Guardian Notes & Theories Robert Bunsen did a whole lot more than invent the Bunsen burner Inventing the Bunsen burner was just one of the achievements of Robert Bunsen, celebrated today in a 200th anniversary Bunsen Google doodle. He was also a stupendous chemist Google doodle celebrating the birth of ace chemist and inventor of the Bunsen burner Robert Bunsen on 30 March 1811. Image: Public domain Notes & Theories Robert Bunsen did a whole lot more than invent the Bunsen burner Inventing the Bunsen burner was just one of the achievements of Robert Bunsen, celebrated today in a 200th anniversary Bunsen Google doodle.

He was also a stupendous chemist Thursday 31 March 2011 08.31 EDT First published on Thursday 31 March 2011 08.31 EDT Share on Messenger Close It's 200 years to the day since the birth of Robert Bunsen, the German chemist famous for inventing the ubiquitous Bunsen burner. But Bunsen's scientific legacy is far, far more important than that – he was one of the most ingenious chemists of the 19th century, whose work led to the discovery of a new element, an antidote for arsenic poisoning and would one day provide clues to the constituents of stars. So it's fitting that Google is celebrating Bunsen's legacy today with an animated Google doodle with bubbling colourful liquids in flasks, a distillation column, test tubes, taps and powering it all, of course, the famous burner. For this modest, quiet man, the Bunsen burner was simply a means to an end.

Bunsen and his faithful lab assistant Peter Desaga (surely the original Beaker ?) needed a very hot, clean flame to pursue their main interest: the characteristic, brightly coloured light emitted by different elements when they are heated. Bunsen was the first person to study these "emission spectra" systematically. Bunsen and his colleague Gustav Kirchhoff went on to split this light into its constituent wavelengths using a prism, in the process inventing a prototype of today's spectroscopes and founding the brand new scientific field of spectroscopy. They discovered that every element emits a distinctive mix of wavelengths that can be used like a fingerprint to identify its presence. It's the same trick that allows astronomers to train their instruments on stars and clouds of gas millions of light years away and say with confidence exactly what they're made of. Bunsen identified the emission spectra of sodium, lithium and potassium. He also detected a previously unseen blue spectral line produced by mineral water which he guessed was being emitted by an unknown element. Having gone to the extraordinary length of distilling 40 tonnes of water to isolate 17 grams of the new element, he called it caesium, meaning "deep blue" in Latin.

(As the radioactive isotope caesium-137 – with a half life of around 30 years – it's responsible for the deadly legacy of nuclear accidents like Chernobyl). There's one more achievement that marks out Robert Bunsen (1811-1899) as a chemist worthy of his Google doodle . Early in his career, he discovered that adding iron oxide hydrate to a solution in which arsenic was dissolved would precipitate the poison and render it harmless. To this day, the compound is used as an antidote for arsenic poisoning. When school pupils first fire up their burners, their teachers would do well to mention this true hero of chemistry. Robert Wilhelm Bunsen WEBMASTER Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-1899) Bunsen was born on March 31, 1811 in G�ttingen, Germany, the youngest of four sons. As his father was a professor of modern languages at the university, an academic environment would surround him from birth. After schooling in the city of Holzminden, Bunsen studied chemistry at G�ttingen.

Receiving his doctorate at age 19, Bunsen set off on extensive travels, partially underwritten by the government, that took him through Germany and Paris and eventually to Vienna from 1830 to 1833. During this time, Bunsen visited Henschel's machinery manufacturing plant and saw the "new small steam engine." In Berlin, he saw the mineralogical collections of Weiss and had contact with Runge, the discoverer of aniline. Continuing on his journeys, Bunsen met with Liebig in Giessen and with Mitscherlich in Bonn for a geological trip through the Eifel mountains. The essential piece of laboratory equipment that has immortalized the name of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen was not invented by him. Bunsen improved the burner's to aid his endeavors in spectroscopy. Ironically, Bunsen will be remembered by generations of chemistry students for a mere improvement in a burner , when his other contributions to the field of chemistry are vastly more significant and diverse, covering such areas as organic chemistry, arsenic compounds, gas measurements and analysis, the galvanic battery, elemental spectroscopy and geology.

In Paris and Vienna, Bunsen visited the Sevres porcelain works and met with the outstanding chemists of the times. These travels allowed Bunsen the opportunity to establish a network of contacts that would stay with him throughout his illustrious career. Upon his return to Germany, Bunsen became a lecturer at G�ttingen and began his experimental studies of the insolubility of metal salts of arsenious acid. His discovery of the use of iron oxide hydrate as a precipitating agent is still the best known antidote against arsenic poisoning to this day. This was his only venture in organic/physiological chemistry. In 1836, Bunsen was nominated to succeed W�hler at Kassel. He taught there for two years before accepting a position at the University of Marsburg which was the site of his important and dangerous studies of cacodyl derivatives. This research was his only work in pure organic chemistry and made him immediately famous within the scientific community. Cacodyl (from the Greek kakodhs - "stinking") was also known as alkarsine or "Cadet's liquid," a product made from arsenic distilled with potassium acetate.

The chemical composition of this liquid was unknown, but it and its compounds were known to be poisonous, highly flammable and had an extremely nauseating odor even in minute quantities. Bunsen himself described one of these compounds: "the smell of this body produces instantaneous tingling of the hands and feet, and even giddiness and insensibility...It is remarkable that when one is exposed to the smell of these compounds the tongue becomes covered with a black coating, even when no further evil effects are noticeable." Bunsen's daring experiments showed that cacodyl was an oxide of arsenic that contained a methyl radical (a group of atoms acting as one species). These results significantly furthered the earlier work by Gay-Lussac, who had isolated the radical cyan in 1815, and that of Liebig and W�hler who published "One the radical of benzoic acid" in 1832. Typical of his research life, however, Bunsen seemed content to explore subjects of interest in his lab, but remained outside the fray that surrounded the often "violent" discussions of theoretical subjects.

Although Bunsen's work brought him quick and wide acclaim, he nearly killed himself from arsenic poisoning and it also cost him the sight of one eye - an explosion of the compound sent a sliver of glass into his eye. While at Marsburg, Bunsen studied blast furnaces and demonstrated that over half the heat was lost in the charcoal-burning German furnaces. In British furnaces, over 80% was lost. Bunsen and a collaborator, Lyon Playfair, suggested techniques that could recycle gases through the furnace and retrieve valuable escaping by-products such as ammonia. Other work during this period concentrated on technological experiments such as the generation of galvanic currents in batteries. In 1841, instead of the expensive platinum electrode used in Grove's battery, Bunsen made a carbon electrode. This led to large scale use of the "Bunsen battery" in the production of arc-light and in electroplating. One of the more memorable episodes during Bunsen's tenure at Marsburg was a geological trip to Iceland sponsored by the Danish government following the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1845.

Indulging his lifelong interest in geology, Bunsen collected gases emitted from volcanic vents and performed extensive chemical analyses of volcanic rock. In addition to sampling lava gases, Bunsen investigated the theory of geyser action. The popular belief of his time was that the water from geysers was volcanic in origin. Bunsen took rocks from the area and boiled them in rain water. He found that the resulting solution was quite similar to geyser water. He conducted temperature studies on the water in the geyser tube at different depths and discovered that the water was indeed hot enough to boil. Due to pressure differentials caused by the moving column of water, boiling occurs in the middle of the tube and throws the mass of water above it into the sky above. In true investigative spirit Bunsen experimented with an artificial geyser in the lab: "To confirm his theory, Bunsen made an artificial geyser, consisting of a basin of water having a long tube extending below it. He heated the tube at the bottom andat about the middlepoint. As the water at the middle reached its boiling point, all of the phenomena of geyser action were beautifully shown, including the preliminary thundering.

That was in 1846. From that day to this Bunsen's theory of geyser action has been generally accepted by geologists." In 1852 Bunsen succeeded Leopold Gmelin at Heidelberg. His stature was such that he attracted students and chemists from all over the world to study in his laboratory. Again, Bunsen ignored the current trend in organic chemistry which was fast overtaking the experimental world. Instead, Bunsen improved his earlier work on batteries: using chromic acid instead of nitric acid, he was able to produce pure metals such as chromium, magnesium, aluminum, manganese, sodium, aluminum, barium, calcium and lithium by electrolysis. Bunsen devised a sensitive ice calorimeter that measured the volume rather than the mass of the ice melted. This allowed him to measure the metals' specific heat to find their true atomic weights. During this period, he also pressed magnesium into wire. The element came into general use as an outstanding illuminating agent. A former student of Bunsen's believes that it was this "splendid light" from the combustion of magnesium that led Bunsen to devote considerable attention to photochemical studies.

A ten year collaboration with Sir Henry Roscoe began in 1852. They took equal volumes of gaseous hydrogen and chlorine and studied the formation of HCl, which occurs in specific relationship to the amount of light received. Their results showed that the light radiated from the sun per minute was equivalent to the chemical energy of 25 x 1012 mi3 of a hydrogen-chlorine mixture forming HCl. In 1859, Bunsen suddenly discontinued his work with Roscoe, telling him: At present Kirchhoff and I are engaged in a common work which doesn't let us sleep...Kirchhoff has made a wonderful, entirely unexpected discovery in finding the cause of the dark lines in the solar spectrum....thus a means has been found to determine the composition of the sun and fixed stars with the same accuracy as we determine sulfuric acid, chlorine, etc., with our chemical reagents.

Substances on the earth can be determined by this method just as easily as on the sun, so that, for example, I have been able to detect lithium in twenty grams of sea water ." Gustav Kirchhoff, a young Prussian physicist, had the brilliant insight to use a prism to separate the light into its constituent rays, instead of looking through colored glass to distinguish between similarly colored flames. Thus the fledgling science of spectroscopy, which would develop into a vital tool for chemical analysis, was born. In order to study the resultant spectra, however, a high temperature, nonluminous flame was necessary. An article published by Bunsen and Kirchhoff in 1860 states: "The lines show up the more distinctly the higher the temperature and the lower the luminescence of the flame itself. The gas burner described by one of us has a flame of very high temperature and little luminescence and is, therefore, particularly suitable for experiments on the bright lines that are characteristic for these substances." The burner described was quickly dubbed the "Bunsen burner," although the apparatus is not of his design.

The concept to premix the gas and air prior to combustion in order to yield the necessary high temperature, nonluminous flame belongs to Bunsen. Credit for the actual design and manufacture of the burner goes to Peter Desaga, a technician at the University of Heidelburg. Within five years of the development of the burner, Bunsen and Kirchhoff were deeply involved with spectroscopy, inventing yet another instrument: the Bunsen-Kirchhoff spectroscope. This vital instrument of chemical analysis can trace its ancestry to such simple components as a "prism, a cigar box, and two ends of otherwise unusable old telescopes." From such humble beginnings came the instrument which proved to be of tremendous importance in chemical analysis and the discovery of new elements. In addition to yielding a unique spectrum for each element, the spectroscope had the advantage of definite identification while only using a minimal amount of sample, on the range of nanograms to micrograms for elements like sodium and barium respectively.

Using the techniques they devised, Bunsen and Kirchhoff announced the discovery of cesium (Latin caesium, "sky blue") in the following passage: "Supported by unambiguous results of the spectral-analytical method, we believe we can state right now that there is a fourth metal in the alkali group besides potassium, sodium, and lithium, and it has a simple characteristic spectrum like lithium; a metal that shows only two lines in our apparatus: a faint blue one, almost coinciding with Srd, and another blue one a little further to the violet end of the spectrum and as strong and as clearly defined as the lithium line." In 1861, only a few months following their cesium discovery, Bunsen and Kirchhoff announced the discovery of yet another new alkali metal. Two hitherto undiscovered violet spectral lines in an alkali of the mineral lepidolite were attributed to a new element, rubidium. Bunsen and Kirchhoff's combined genius quickly paved the way for others to claim elemental discoveries. The spectroscope served as a springboard by which five new elements were discovered.

These included thallium (Crookes, 1861), indium (Reich and Richter, 1863), gallium (Lecoq de Boisbaudran, 1875), scandium (Nilson, 1879) and germanium (Winkler, 1886). Fittingly, Bunsen's original vision of analyzing the composition of the stars was realized in 1868 when helium was discovered in the solar spectrum. Throughout his professional life, Bunsen's personal life centered around his laboratory and his students. Never marrying, Bunsen often took on the introductory courses that were shunned by other colleagues. During the one hundred hours of lectures presented each semester, Bunsen emphasized experimentation and tabulated summaries and patiently introduced students to the world of analytical chemistry. Bunsen's habit was to assign a scientific task to his students and then to work with a student only as long as required to reach some measure of independence. Many principal players in the history of chemistry can trace their chemical roots back to Bunsen's laboratory. Two of his more famous students were Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer.

According to accounts, Bunsen was one of the more modest of giants: "He never said: 'I have discovered,' or 'I found'...He was characterized by extraordinary, distinguished modesty. That does not mean that he was not conscious of his own value. He knew how to use it at the right time and in the right company; he even had a considerable degree of very sound egotism." The scientific world held Bunsen in high esteem for much of his long professional life. In 1842 he was elected to the Chemical Society of London and the Academie des Sciences in 1853. He was named a foreign fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1858, receiving its Copley Medal in 1860. Bunsen and Kirchhoff were recipients of the first Davy Medal in 1877. The Albert Medal was awarded in 1898 in recognition of Bunsen's many scientific contributions to industry.

Of these honors, Bunsen once remarked,"Such things had value for me only because they pleased my mother; she is now dead." Upon his retirement at the age of 78, Bunsen left the chemical work behind, returned to his first love of geology, keeping up with the latest developments in the field and corresponding with his old friends such as Roscoe, Kirchhoff and Helmholtz. Bunsen died August 16, 1899 after a peaceful three day sleep, leaving behind a glowing legacy of discoveries and technological advances that allowed the world of chemistry to burn brightly. (reference: Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff | Chemical Heritage Foundation Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff The spectroscope, invented by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, inaugurated a new era in the search for undiscovered elements. Home / Learn / Historical Biographies In 1860 Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff discovered two alkali metals, cesium and rubidium, with the aid of the spectroscope they had invented the year before. These discoveries inaugurated a new era in the means used to find new elements.

The first 50 elements discovered—beyond those known since ancient times—were either the products of chemical reactions or were released by electrolysis. From 1860 the search was on for trace elements detectable only with the help of specialized instruments like the spectroscope. Bunsen’s Early Career Bunsen (1811–1899) , the son of a professor of modern languages at Göttingen University in Germany, earned his doctorate from Göttingen in 1830. He was then given a three-year travel grant that took him to factories, places of geological interest, and famous laboratories, including Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac ’s in Paris. Early in his career he did research in organic chemistry, which cost him the use of his right eye when an arsenic compound, cacodyl cyanide, exploded. Throughout his career he remained deeply interested in geological topics and once made daring temperature measurements of the water in the geyser tube of Iceland’s Great Geyser just before it erupted.

Gustav Kirchhoff - Physicist, Scientist - Biography.com Gustav Kirchhoff German physicist Gustav Kirchoff became the first scientist to show that electric current flows at the speed of light through a conductor. IN THESE GROUPS Famous People Named Kirchhoff Synopsis German physicist Gustav Kirchoff, born 1824, became the first scientist to show that electric current flows at the speed of light through a conductor. Additionally, Kirchoff worked with Robert Bunsen to prove elements heated to specific temperatures emit colored light, leading to the discovery of cesium and rubidium. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Citation Information

Question: What was the nationality of the scientist Robert Bunsen?
Answer: German