Analytical chemistry and instrumentation · 1811–1899

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen

Bunsen’s reputation rests less on any theory than on instruments and methods that made other people’s work possible. At Heidelberg he developed a gas burner giving a hot, almost colourless flame — essential if the light from a sample is to be read rather than swamped — along with a carbon–zinc battery, an ice calorimeter and a grease-spot photometer. He lost the sight of one eye to an arsenic compound explosion early in his career and thereafter kept away from the organoarsenic work that had nearly killed him.