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Updated: May 8, 2025
Clearly such an instrument must prove a veritable magic wand in the hands of the astronomer. Very soon eager astronomers all over the world were putting the spectroscope to the test. Kirchhoff himself led the way, and Donati and Father Secchi in Italy, Huggins and Miller in England, and Rutherfurd in America, were the chief of his immediate followers.
During the Somme battles several of the American correspondents in Berlin were invited to go to the front near Peronne and were asked to luncheon by the Bavarian General von Kirchhoff, who was in command against the French.
On the occasion here referred to Kirchhoff also succeeded in reversing a bright band of lithium. The long-standing difficulty of Fraunhofer's lines fell to pieces in the presence of facts and reflections like these, which also carried with them an immeasurable extension of the chemist's power.
Kirchhoff, accordingly, included in his great memoir "On the Solar Spectrum," read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, July 11, 1861, an exposition of the views on the subject to which his memorable investigations had led him.
Kirchhoff formed a spectrum of the limelight, and after the two bright lines had vanished, he placed his salt flame in front of the slit. The two dark lines immediately started forth. Thus, in the continuous spectrum of the lime-light, he evoked, artificially, the lines D of Fraunhofer.
He replaced uncertainty by certainty, vagueness by definiteness, confusion by order; and I do not think that Newton has a surer claim to the discoveries that have made his name immortal, than Kirchhoff has to the credit of gathering up the fragmentary knowledge of his time, of vastly extending it, and of infusing into it the life of great principles.
No sooner had Kirchhoff supplied the key to the hidden meaning of those ciphered characters than it was eagerly turned to the interpretation of the dim scrolls unfolded in the spectra of the stars. Donati made at Florence in 1860 the first efforts in this direction; but with little result, owing to the imperfections of the instrumental means at his command.
W. Siemens has lately determined velocity of propagation of electricity in suspended iron telegraph wires, and finds it to be between 30,000 and 35,000 miles per second. Kirchhoff had determined it at 21,000 miles and Wheatstone at 61,900 miles. Prof.
'But none of these distinguished men betrayed the least knowledge of the connexion between the bright bands of the metals and the dark lines of the solar spectrum; nor could spectrum analysis be said to be placed upon anything like a safe foundation prior to the researches of Bunsen and Kirchhoff. The man who, in a published paper, came nearest to the philosophy of the subject was Ångström.
Wollaston, but they were afterwards multiplied and measured by Fraunhofer with such masterly skill, that they are now universally known as Fraunhofer's lines. To give an explanation of these lines was, as I have said, a problem which long challenged the attention of philosophers, and to Professor Kirchhoff belongs the honour of having first conquered this problem.
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