Robert Bunsen

• Born: 31 March 1811
• Birthplace: Göttingen, Germany
• Died: 16 August 1899
• Best Known As: Spectrometer inventor with the gas burner name

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen did groundbreaking work in organic chemistry and spectrometry, but he's more famous for the laboratory gas burner that bears his name. Bunsen was an extraordinary experimentalist and popular university teacher who made a name for himself in the 1830s with experiments using organic arsenic compounds. Those experiments nearly cost him his life -- an explosion caused the loss of sight in one eye and a bad case of arsenic poisoning, and he later forbade organic chemistry experiments in his lab. He taught for many years at the University of Marsburg (1838-51), but is most closely associated with the University of Heidelberg, where he worked from 1852 until his retirement in 1889. He invented many lab tools, including a grease-spot photometer, a galvanic battery and an ice calorimeter, and, with Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, a spectrometer (1859) that led to his discovery of the elements cesium and rubidium. Around 1855 he had university mechanic Peter Desaga build a gas burner that would produce a steady and near-colorless flame for lab experiments (Michael Faraday had used a similar burner). The result, known as a Bunsen burner, is one of the most commonly recognized lab tools to this day.

Bunsen had a lifelong interest in geology, and in the 1840s he proved experimentally how geysers work... Bunsen, like John Dalton, was a bachelor his entire life.

For more information on Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, visit Britannica.com.

German chemist (1811–1899)

Bunsen, the son of a professor of linguistics, gained his doctorate at the university in his native city of Göttingen (1830) with a thesis on hygrometers. After an extensive scientific tour in Europe, he became a lecturer at Göttingen in 1834. He was professor of chemistry at Kassel (1836), Marburg (1841), and Heidelberg (1852–89).

Bunsen carried out one great series of researches in organic chemistry, Studies in the Cacodyl Series (1837–42), after which he abandoned organic for analytical and inorganic chemistry. During his research on the highly toxic cacodyl compound he lost one eye in an explosion and twice nearly killed himself through arsenic poisoning. He prepared various derivatives of cacodyl (tetramethylarsine, (CH₃)₂As₂(CH₃)₂), including the chloride, iodide, fluoride, and cyanide, and his work was eagerly welcomed by Jöns Berzelius as confirmation of his theory that organic chemistry mirrored inorganic, the ‘radical theory’.

Bunsen was a great experimentalist, an expert in gas analysis and glass blowing, and a pioneer of photochemistry and spectroscopy. He also worked in electrochemistry, devising an improved version of the Grove cell. At Heidelberg he used his new cell to produce metals by electrodeposition. The classic paper Chemical Analysis through Observation of the Spectrum (1860) by Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff ushered in the era of chemical spectroscopy. The spectroscope was an extremely sensitive analytical instrument. With it Bunsen discovered two new elements: rubidium and cesium.

The famous Bunsen burner was introduced by him in 1855, although a similar burner, used by Michael Faraday, did exist before Bunsen and the regulating collar was a later refinement. He greatly refined gas analysis and wrote a standard treatise on the subject, Gasometrische Methoden (1857, Methods in Gas Measurement).

Bunsen was a great teacher and at Heidelberg he became a legend. Chemists who came to study with him included Adolph Kolbe, Edward Frankland, Victor and Lothar Meyer, Friedrich Beilstein, and Johann Baeyer.

The German chemist and physicist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-1899) was one of the great experimental chemists and a pioneer of chemical spectroscopy.

Robert Bunsen was born on March 31, 1811, in the university town of Göttingen. His father was professor of linguistics and librarian at the university. Bunsen completed his advanced education at Göttingen, developing an extensive mastery of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and mineralogy. In later years, when his fame as an experimentalist was worldwide, Bunsen stated that "a chemist who is not a physicist is nothing."

With his strong practical bent and interest in the expanding industrial revolution, Bunsen studied blast furnace operations, the working of steam engines, and the physiochemical processes of the famed porcelain works at Sèvres. In later years his scientific discoveries contributed to the increased efficiency of some of these basic industries.

Bunsen established his reputation through his work in inorganic chemistry and his classical set of experiments in organic chemistry which involved the properties of the cacodyl series of compounds. These organic arsenic bodies were highly dangerous, and his work with them nearly cost Bunsen his life. A useful by-product of this research was his discovery of the antidote for arsenic poisoning.

In 1852 Bunsen succeeded Leopold Gmelin in Heidelberg. There he established his Institute of Chemistry, which soon attracted the most brilliant students from all over the world, including Edward Frankland, the developer of the theory of chemical valency, and Victor Meyer, the pioneer in the chemistry of benzene compounds.

A master craftsman, Bunsen developed many of the instruments for analytical chemistry, including the burner which bears his name but which had been used first in a primitive form by Michael Faraday. The ice calorimeter and many devices for gas analysis were the product of Bunsen's personal skill.

Bunsen contributed to the foundations of photochemistry in collaboration with H. E. Roscoe, determining the effect of light on the combining reactions of hydrogen and chlorine. This led Bunsen to the first effort to estimate the radiant energy of the sun.

The most fruitful collaboration of Bunsen was his work with Gustav Kirchhoff, the German physicist. By combining the Bunsen burner with the optical system pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer, the two scientists developed the science and art of spectroscopy. Since each chemical element rendered radiant by the heat source emitted a characteristic pattern of lines (spectrum), there had been developed the supreme instrument of chemical analysis. Bunsen and Kirchhoff soon discovered two hitherto-unknown elements, cesium and rubidium.

Further Reading

A good account of Bunsen appears in volume 4 of J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry (1964). Eduard Farber, ed., Great Chemists (1961), contains a short biographical sketch. Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry, 1400-1900 (1952), includes a description of Bunsen's work.

Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm (Göttingen, 1811-99, Heidelberg), the distinguished chemist, who occupied chairs successively at Marburg (1838), Breslau (1851), and Heidelberg (1852), retiring in 1889. With G. R. Kirchhoff (1824-87) he developed spectrum analysis. He invented many appliances, and is most widely known for the Bunsen cell (1841) and, above all, the Bunsen burner (1855).

Robert Bunsen
Born	31 March 1811(1811-03-31) Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover, Germany
Died	16 August 1899 (aged 88) Heidelberg, Germany
Residence	Germany
Nationality	German
Fields	Chemist
Institutions	Polytechnic School of Kassel University of Marburg University of Heidelberg University of Breslau
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	Friedrich Stromeyer
Doctoral students	Adolf von Baeyer Fritz Haber Philipp Lenard Georg Ludwig Carius Hermann Kolbe Adolf Lieben Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Viktor Meyer Friedrich Konrad Beilstein Henry Enfield Roscoe John Tyndall Edward Frankland Dmitri Mendeleev Thomas Edward Thorpe Francis Robert Japp
Known for	Discovery of cacodyl radical; discoveries of caesium and rubidium; Bunsen burner; carbon-zinc electrochemical cell; methods of gas analysis; development of spectrochemical analysis
Notable awards	Copley medal (1860)

Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (31 March 1811 – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and with Gustav Kirchhoff he discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861). Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, he was a pioneer in photochemistry, and he 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 his colleague, Gustav Kirchhoff.

Contents 1 Life and work 1.1 University teacher 1.2 Retirement and death 2 Character 3 Notes and references 4 Further reading 5 External links

Life and work

Bunsen was born in Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover, Germany. He was the youngest of four sons of the University of Göttingen's chief librarian and professor of modern philology, Christian Bunsen (1770–1837).^[1] After attending school in Holzminden, Robert Bunsen studied chemistry. During this time, he met Friedrich Runge (who discovered aniline and in 1819 isolated caffeine), Justus von Liebig in Gießen, and Eilhard Mitscherlich in Bonn.

University teacher

Bunsen became a lecturer at Göttingen and began experimental studies of the (in)solubility of metal salts of arsenous acid. Today, his discovery of the use of iron oxide hydrate as a precipitating agent is still the best-known antidote against arsenic poisoning.

In 1836, Bunsen succeeded Friedrich Wöhler at Kassel. Bunsen taught there for three years, and then accepted an associate professorship at the University of Marburg, where he studied cacodyl derivatives. He was promoted to full professor in 1841. Bunsen's work brought him quick and wide acclaim, partly because cacodyl, which is extremely toxic and undergoes spontaneous combustion in dry air, is so difficult to work with. Bunsen almost died from arsenic poisoning, and an explosion with cacodyl cost him sight in his right eye. In 1841, Bunsen created the Bunsen cell battery, using a carbon electrode instead of the expensive platinum electrode used in William Robert Grove's electrochemical cell. Early in 1851 he accepted a professorship at the University of Breslau, where he taught for three semesters.

In late 1852 Robert Bunsen became the successor of Leopold Gmelin at the University of Heidelberg. There he used electrolysis to produce pure metals, such as chromium, magnesium, aluminium, manganese, sodium, barium, calcium and lithium. A long collaboration with Henry Enfield Roscoe began in 1852, in which they studied the photochemical formation of hydrogen chloride from hydrogen and chlorine.

Bunsen discontinued his work with Roscoe in 1859 and joined Gustav Kirchhoff to study emission spectra of heated elements, a research area called spectrum analysis. For this work, Bunsen and his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, had perfected a special gas burner by 1855, influenced by earlier models. The newer design of Bunsen and Desaga, which provided a very hot and clean flame, is now called simply the "Bunsen burner".^[2][3]

In 1860, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Retirement and death

When Bunsen retired at the age of 78, he shifted his work solely to geology and mineralogy, an interest which he had pursued throughout his career. He died in Heidelberg, and was buried there.

Character

Bunsen was one of the most universally admired scientists of his generation. He was a master teacher, devoted to his students, and they were equally devoted to him. At a time of vigorous and often caustic scientific debates, Bunsen always conducted himself as a perfect gentleman, maintaining his distance from theoretical disputes. He much preferred to work quietly in his laboratory, regularly enriching his science with useful discoveries. On a point of principle, he never took out a patent, despite the fact that his new battery and new laboratory burner would surely have brought him great wealth.

Notes and references

1. ^ "Professor Robert W. Bunsen". The Journal of the American Chemical Society 23: 89 – 107. 1900. http://books.google.com/books?id=u9oBAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA89&dq=robert+bunsen+son&as_brr=1. Retrieved 2007-09-11. 
2. ^ Jensen, William B. (2005). "The Origin of the Bunsen Burner". Journal of Chemical Education 82 (4). http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/HS/Journal/Issues/2005/Apr/clicSubscriber/V82N04/p518.pdf. 
3. ^ See Michael Faraday's Chemical Manipulation, Being Instructions to Students in Chemistry (1827)

Further reading

• Gasometry: Comprising the Leading Physical and Chemical Properties of Gases by Robert Bunsen; translated by Henry Roscoe. London: Walton and Maberly, 1857
  

  

  Bunsen's grave in Heidelberg's Bergfriedhof
• Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, by G. Lockeman, 1949.
• Sir Henry Roscoe's "Bunsen Memorial Lecture," in: Trans. Chem. Soc., 1900, reprinted (in German) with other obituary notices in an edition of Bunsen's collected works published by Wilhelm Ostwald and Max Bodenstein in 3 vols. at Leipzig in 1904. This is Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Robert Bunsen: im Auftrage der Deutschen Bunsen-Gesellschaft für angewandte Physikalische Chemie hrsg. von Wilhelm Ostwald und Max Bodenstein. 3 Bände. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1904
• Crew, H. (1899). "Robert Wilhelm Bunsen". The Astrophysical Journal 10: 301 – 305. doi:10.1086/140654. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1899ApJ....10..301C. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
• Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, edited by Christine Stock, Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft Stuttgart, 2007.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm von.

• Robert Wilhelm Bunsen
• Bunsen and Kirchhoff
• Robert Wilhelm Bunsen

Persondata
NAME	Bunsen, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Chemist
DATE OF BIRTH	31 March 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH	Göttingen, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	15 August 1899
PLACE OF DEATH	Heidelberg, Germany

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)