The Bunsen burner is the iconic symbol of high school chemistry and, for millions of inquiring scientists, "such stuff as dreams are made on." Yet while we all may be familiar with this blazing apparatus, relatively few know exactly who Bunsen was.
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (1811-1899) was born in Göttingen, which was then part of the Kingdom of Westphalia. His father, Christian, a professor of modern philology and chief librarian at Germany’s famed University of Göttingen, encouraged his son to constantly study, question, and verify. Fascinated by all things physical, geological, mathematical, and chemical, Robert Bunsen took his doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1830.
Before joining the faculty at Göttingen in 1833, Bunsen was awarded a prestigious, three-year travel grant across Germany, France and Austria where he observed the laboratories of such prominent scientists as Gay-Lussac and Liebig, mineral mines, geological sites, and the great crucibles of modern chemistry during the Industrial Revolution: the burgeoning factories that smelted, painted, processed, and mass produced virtually every modern convenience under the sun. In 1852, after teaching stints at Göttingen, Kassel, Marburg and Breslau, Bunsen was called to a professorship at the prestigious Heidelberg University.
Chemists have been arguing for years over who deserves credit for creating the gas burner. Even though it had been used in Bunsen’s laboratory since 1855, Bunsen and an English chemist named Henry E. Roscoe (1833-1915) formally announced the burner now called Bunsen in an 1857 article on photochemistry. To be sure, prototypical versions of laboratory burners date back to at least the 1820s, when gas lighting was introduced to the larger cities of Europe. But the problem with many of these earlier gadgets, including a "gauze burner" Roscoe brought with him from England, was that the flame produced was diffuse and insufficiently hot; such flames also flickered and emitted changing colors caused by contaminants on these burners' metal protective screens.
The experiments Bunsen and Roscoe were pursuing at this time, in collaboration with another brilliant scientist named Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887), centered on the establishment of spectral standards for the identification of terrestrial and celestial matter. It all began one day in the lab when the trio were heating a sample of pure magnesium. The brilliant light emitted stunned and impressed Bunsen and his colleagues. Indeed, this observation led to the determination that different elements and compounds gave off specific, measurable wavelengths when viewed through a prism, or what is now known as spectrum analysis.
But in order to reliably reproduce these photochemical fingerprints, Bunsen required a colorless, soot-free flame of predictable and constant size. Working with an intrepid instrument maker named Peter Desaga, a long, narrow tube was fashioned with an adjustable valve that governed specific mixtures of natural gas and air. Upon achieving the precise length and width of the tube, it became possible to prevent the flame from traveling down the device, thus obviating the need for a wire safety screen. The Bunsen burner had an added value in that it produced a much hotter and more concentrated flame, which was applicable to a wide host of chemical inquiries.
As with many major inventions, a few would-be inventors made claims of priority on the gas burner but these were successfully challenged and fought down by Peter Desaga. Interestingly, Professor Bunsen never retained a patent nor did he take any profits from the now ubiquitous apparatus.
By the close of the 1860s, the Bunsen burner had replaced the standard issue charcoal furnaces that long dominated and polluted 19th century chemical laboratories. It has been improved and tinkered with many times since but has never been replaced.rnRobert Bunsen was a beloved teacher and brilliant chemist. He discovered the elements cesium and rubidium, helped developed the field of spectroscopy, and even found an antidote for arsenic poisoning in a series of experiments that cost him vision in one eye. But his scientific immortality rests firmly upon his (and Desaga's) elegant flaming device.