Skip to main content

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (March 30, 1811-August 16, 1899)

Robert Bunsen

Born 31 March 1811(1811-03-31)
Göttingen, Kingdom of Hanover, Germany
Died 16 August 1899(1899-08-16) (aged 88)
Heidelberg, Germany
Residence Germany
Nationality Germany
Fields Chemistry
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.Invention of the Bunsen burner; carbon-zinc electrochemical cell; methods of gas analysis; development of spectrochemical analysis
Notable awards Copley medal (1860)


Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (March 30, 1811-August 16, 1899) was a German chemist. He perfected the burner that was named after him, invented by British chemist/physicist Michael Faraday, and worked on emission spectroscopy of heated elements.

Bunsen was the youngest of four sons. After attending school in Holzminden, he studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate at 19 and then, from 1830 to 1833, traveled across western Europe. During this time, he met Runge, the discoverer of aniline, Justus von Liebig in Giessen, and Mitscherlich in Bonn.

After his return to Germany, Bunsen became a lecturer at Göttingen and began experimental studies of the (in)solubility of metal salts of arsenious 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 succeed Wöhler at Kassel. After teaching there for two years, he accepted a position at the University of Marburg, where he studied cacodyl derivatives. Although Bunsen's work brought him quick and wide acclaim, he almost killed himself from arsenic poisoning. It also cost him the sight of one eye, when an explosion propelled a glass sliver into his eye. In 1841, Bunsen created a carbon electrode that could be used instead of the expensive platinum electrode used in Grove's battery.

In 1852, Bunsen took the position of Leopold Gmelin at Heidelberg. Using nitric acid, he was able to produce pure metals such as chromium, magnesium, aluminum, manganese, sodium, barium, calcium and lithium by electrolysis. A ten-year collaboration with Sir Henry Roscoe began in 1852, studying the formation of hydrogen chloride from hydrogen and chlorine.

In 1859, Bunsen discontinued his work with Roscoe and joined Gustav Kirchhoff to study emission spectroscopy of heated elements. For that purpose, Bunsen perfected a special gas burner, invented by the scientist Michael Faraday in 1885 that was later named the "Bunsen burner". When Bunsen retired at the age of 78, he shifted his interest to geology, which had long been a hobby of his.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Standard and Formatted Input / Output in C++

The C++ standard libraries provide an extensive set of input/output capabilities which we will see in subsequent chapters. This chapter will discuss very basic and most common I/O operations required for C++ programming. C++ I/O occurs in streams, which are sequences of bytes. If bytes flow from a device like a keyboard, a disk drive, or a network connection etc. to main memory, this is called   input operation   and if bytes flow from main memory to a device like a display screen, a printer, a disk drive, or a network connection, etc., this is called   output operation . Standard Input and Output in C++ is done through the use of  streams . Streams are generic places to send or receive data. In C++, I/O is done through classes and objects defined in the header file  <iostream> .  iostream  stands for standard input-output stream. This header file contains definitions to objects like  cin ,  cout , etc. /O Library Header Files There are...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Warehousing - An Overview

Anurag Information Technology (IT) has historically influenced organizational performance and competitive standing. The increasing processing power and sophistication of analytical tools and techniques have put the strong foundation for the product called data warehouse. There are a number of reasons that any organization should consider a data warehouse, which can be the critical tool for maximizing the organization’s investment in the information it has collected and stored throughout the enterprise. IT managers need to understand the rationale and benefits of data warehouses because they may need to design and implement, or procure this kingpin of business intelligence. The data warehouses are supposed to provide storage, functionality and responsiveness to queries beyond the capabilities of today's transaction-oriented databases. Also data warehouses are set to improve the data access performance of databases. Traditional databases balance the requirement of data access w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Normalization in DBMS: 1NF, 2NF, 3NF and BCNF in Database

Normalization   is a process of organizing the data in database to avoid data redundancy, insertion anomaly, update anomaly & deletion anomaly.  Anomalies in DBMS There are three types of anomalies that occur when the database is not normalized. These are – Insertion, update and deletion anomaly. Let’s take an example to understand this. Example : Suppose a manufacturing company stores the employee details in a table named employee that has four attributes: emp_id for storing employee’s id, emp_name for storing employee’s name, emp_address for storing employee’s address and emp_dept for storing the department details in which the employee works. At some point of time the table looks like this: emp_id emp_name emp_address emp_dept 101 Nikhil Kangra D001 101 Nikhil Kangra D002 123 Ashish Shimla D890 166 Rahul Pathankot D900 166 Rahul Pathankot D004 The above table is not normalized.  Update anomaly : In the above table we have two rows for employee Nikhil as he belongs ...
Post a Comment
Read more