Joseph von Fraunhofer
Bavarian physicist and optical lens manufacturer · Germany · Scientists · Lived 1787 to 1826 · aged 39
Joseph von Fraunhofer is read about 170 times a day, in 65 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 7 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 382 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He found dark lines crossing the sun's light where no one else had looked - and those lines became astronomy's Rosetta Stone, letting us read the chemistry of stars from Earth.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 1
, In all my experiments I could, owing to lack of time, pay attention to only those matters which appeared to have a bearing upon practical optics.
Awards
Family
Parents
Joseph von FraunhoferIs this everyone?
Only relatives with a profile here are drawn, so a family can be larger than this. A line here can also be wrong.
Correct this familyAbout this person
Born in 1787, Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer was a German physicist and optical lens manufacturer who made achromatic telescopes and objective lenses by refining optical glass to new standards. In 1814, he discovered dark absorption lines in the sun's spectrum - now called Fraunhofer lines - and studied them systematically. He developed diffraction grating and invented the spectroscope, tools that turned those lines into a method for determining the composition of celestial bodies. He died in 1826 at thirty-nine. Europe's largest applied research organization, the Fraunhofer Society, carries his name, and his epitaph reads *Aproximavit sidera*: He brought closer the stars.
Scientists from Germany 6
Fame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.