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Updated: May 8, 2025
Precisely what this implies and involves we do not know; but the symptoms of its occurrence are probably altogether different from those gathered by Sir Norman Lockyer from the collation of celestial spectra. A. J. Ångström of Upsala takes rank after Kirchhoff as a subordinate founder, so to speak, of solar spectroscopy.
Thus indications of a wider principle were to be found in several quarters, but no positive certainty on any single point was obtained, until, in 1859, Gustav Kirchhoff, professor of physics in the University of Heidelberg, and his colleague, the eminent chemist Robert Bunsen, took the matter in hand.
A theory to account for the black lines crossing the coloured band of light, or spectrum, which is obtained by passing sunlight through a glass prism, originally suggested by Sir George Stokes, and subsequently reintroduced and verified by the German chemists, Bunsen and Kirchhoff, led to the important discovery that the sun and the stars are constituted of the very same elements as those of the earth beneath our feet.
And whereas at school I had only studied astronomy as a subject, from its mathematical aspect, I now learnt the results of spectroscopic analysis, which showed me how the human genius of Bunsen and Kirchhoff had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the Sun; and at the same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the culture of our Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as the Earth had never yet received communications from the civilisation of any of the stars.
The establishment of the terrestrial science of spectrum analysis was due, as we have seen, equally to Kirchhoff and Bunsen, but its celestial application to Kirchhoff alone.
Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Mollendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the Odyssey is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. It is, of course, possible that Mr.
He juts, it is true, above the table-land, as a massive peak; still he is supported by the plateau, and a great part of his absolute height is the height of humanity in his time. It is thus with the discoveries of Kirchhoff. Much had been previously accomplished; this he mastered, and then by the force of individual genius went beyond it.
The perfection of this instrument, in the hands of two German scientists, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, came about through the investigation, towards the middle of the century, of the meaning of the dark lines which had been observed in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer as early as 1815, and by Wollaston a decade earlier.
Wollaston gave me the little prism, which is doubly valuable, being of glass manufactured at Munich by Fraunhofer, whose table of dark lines has now become the standard of comparison in that marvellous science, the work of many illustrious men, brought to perfection by Bunsen and Kirchhoff.
Darwin obtained these results, fourteen years ago, he could claim for Drosera a power and delicacy in the detection of minute quantities of a substance far beyond the resources of the most skillful chemist; but in a foot-note he admits that "now the spectroscope has altogether beaten Drosera; for, according to Bunsen and Kirchhoff, probably less than the 1/200000000 of a grain of sodium can be thus detected."
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