Robert Bunsen
German chemist (1811-1899) · Germany · Scientists · Died at 88
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Something wrong?Every chemistry student knows the burner. Fewer know Bunsen discovered two elements by watching firelight through a prism, splitting color into chemical fingerprint.
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Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was born 30 March 1811 in Germany and trained as a chemist at a time when the lab was still improvisation and open flame. He pioneered photochemistry and wrestled with organic arsenic compounds, dangerous work that nearly cost him an eye. In 1860, working with physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, he turned a spectroscope on heated elements and found caesium; rubidium followed in 1861 - both discovered not by isolating crystals but by reading the signature colors they gave off. He refined gas analysis methods and, with his assistant Peter Desaga, improved the clumsy laboratory burners of the day into the clean, adjustable flame that still carries his name. Bunsen died 16 August 1899, his burner outlasting him in every teaching lab on earth.
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