Abstract
Often the mix of two seemingly disparate fields of study produces spectacular results in science. Such was the case when Michael Faraday experimented with electricity and magnetism: he invented the dynamo, or generator. Another interesting marriage took place when electricity was brought into the ‘chemists’ labs: a novel method of breaking substances into simple elements was discovered.
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Notes
- 1.
These included a 9.5-in. refracting telescope at Russia’s Dorpat Observatory, that was used by the famous Russian astronomer F. G. Wilhelm Struve to make the first large survey of stars. Struve commented upon seeing the instrument: “I stood astonished before this beautiful instrument, undetermined whether to admire most, the beauty and elegance of the workmanship in its most minute parts, the propriety of its construction, the ingenious mechanism for moving it, or the incomparable optical power of the telescope.” (Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 2 (1826), 93.)
- 2.
J. S. Ames, Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra: Memoirs by Joseph von Fraunhofer (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1898); reprinted in ‘The wave theory of light and spectra,’ ed. I. Bernard (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 4.
- 3.
Charles Babbage wrote about the difficulty in seeing the Fraunhofer’s lines in his Reflexions on the Decline of Science in England (1830), when he recounted his meeting with John Herschel who showed him the dark lines: “A striking illustration of the fact that an object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect in the organ of vision, occurred to me some years since, when on a visit at Slough. Conversing with Mr. Herschel on the dark lines seen in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer, he inquired whether I had seen them; and on my replying in the negative, and expressing a desire to see them, he mentioned the extreme difficulty he had had, even with Fraunhofer’s description in his hand and the long time which it had cost him in detecting them. My friend then added, ‘I will prepare the apparatus, and put you in such a position that they shall be visible, and yet you shall look for them and not find them: after which, while you remain in the same position, I will instruct you how to see them, and you shall see them, and not merely wonder [why] you did not see them before, but you shall find it impossible to look at the spectrum without seeing them.’”
- 4.
It appears that there was a sighting of dark lines even in the eighteenth century. Thomas Melvill had studied the passing of light from a pinhole through a prism in 1752 and saw a bright yellow spot with darkness on two sides. (See M. A. Sutton, “John Herschel and the development of spectroscopy in Britain,” The British Journal of the History of Science, Vol. 7 (1974), 43.)
- 5.
William H. Wollaston, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., London, II (1802), 365; in German: Gilberts Ann., Vol. 31 (1809), 398.
- 6.
Alfred Leitner, “The life and work of Joseph Fraunhofer (1787–1826),” Am. J. Phys., Vol. 43 (1975), 62.
- 7.
J. S. Ames, “Prismatic and diffraction spectra: Memoirs by Joseph von Fraunhofer” [Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1898], 9.
- 8.
The Edinburgh Journal of Science, Vol. 5 (1826), 81.
- 9.
See, J. Götschl, Revolutionary Changes in Understanding Man and Society: Scopes and Limits (Springer, 1995), 57.
- 10.
Ibid., 57–58.
- 11.
Ibid., 58.
- 12.
Ibid., 59.
- 13.
Ibid., 60.
- 14.
John Herschel, “Treatises on physical astronomy, light and sound,” contributed to the Encyclopedia Metropolitana (Richard Griffin & Co., London, Glasgow:1827), 434.
- 15.
The term ‘spectroscopy’ was coined much later, in 1882, by Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster, a German-born British physicist, who thought one should not only use spectra to identify new chemical elements, but that the lines might give clues to the structure of the atoms as well. In his progress report on spectra at a meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science, he said: “It is the ambitious object of spectroscopy to study the vibration of atoms and molecules in order to obtain what information we can about the nature of forces which bind them together…But we must not too soon expect the discovery of any grand and very general law, for the constitution of what we call a molecule is no doubt a very complicated one, and the difficulty of the problem is so great that were it not for the primary importance of the result which we may finally hope to obtain, all but the most sanguine might well be discouraged to engage in an inquiry which, even after many years of work, may turn out to have been fruitless. We know a great deal more about the forces which produce the vibrations of sound than about those which produce the vibrations of light. To find out the different tunes sent out by a vibrating system is a problem which may or may not be solvable in certain special cases, but it would baffle the most skillful mathematician to solve the inverse problem and to find out the shape of a bell by means of the sounds which it is capable of sending out. And this is the problem which ultimately spectroscopy hopes to solve in the case of light.” (J. Mehra, H. Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1., Part I, Springer: 1982, 161–162.)
- 16.
Joseph N. Lockyer, Studies in Spectrum Analysis, 1878; reprinted by Cambridge University Press (2011), 81.
- 17.
George Stokes, Phil. Mag., Vol. 19 (4th series) (1860), 194–196; translated from L’Institut (Feb 7, 1849), 45.
- 18.
W. A. Miller of King’s College, London, also noticed the coincidence independently, and noted that the match was “accurate to an astonishing degree of minuteness.” [See Joseph N. Lockyer, Contributions to solar physics (Macmillan & Co., 1874), 187.]
- 19.
William Tobin, The Life and Science of Léon Foucault: The Man Who Proved the Earth Rotates (Cambridge University Press: 2003), 110.
- 20.
Foucault had a dinner-table conversation with George Stokes in 1855, when he came to receive the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. Stokes later wrote about it: “That a medium was simultaneously D-emissive and D-absorptive struck me with all the freshness of originality when Foucault told me it in 1855.” (See “The correspondence between Sir George Gabriel Stokes, and Sir William Thompson, Baron Kelvin of Largs,” ed. D. B. Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 359.) He thought he should have translated the works of Foucault into English, because then the reversal of D lines might have become more widely known and an explanation might have been arrived at sooner.
- 21.
This had been previously observed by George Stokes. He discussed with William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) at Cambridge in the summer of 1852 how the double lines in the solar spectrum coincided remarkably with the double yellow lines in many flames and the fact that when salt is thrown into an alcohol flame how it turns yellow and showed the double yellow lines. Years later, he recounted the discussion: “In conversation with Thomson I explained the connection of the bright and dark lines by the analogy of a set of piano strings tuned to the same note, which if struck would give out that note and would also be ready to sound out, to take it up in fact, if it were sounded in air. This would imply absorption of the aerial vibrations. I told Thomson I believed there was vapour of sodium in the sun’s atmosphere.” Thomson was so intrigued by the idea that he began to teach this idea in his classes in 1852–3. However Stokes knew that purity of samples was critical to prove it and that it “would be extremely difficult to prove, except in the case of gases or substance volatile at a not very high temperature, that the bright line D, if observed in a flame, was not due to soda, such an infinitesimal quantity of soda would be competent to produce it.” (See S. Sternberg, Group Theory and Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 389.)
- 22.
Swan also identified some of the ‘bands,’ or groups of lines, that Fraunhofer had seen in the spectra of stars, as being due to carbon and hydrocarbon compounds. They are seen in the spectra of cool, red stars.
- 23.
Speaking of the difficulty of Kirchhoff and Bunsen’s experiments, Roscoe mentioned the ubiquity of salt in the air: “There is not a speck of dust or a mote in the sunbeam, which does not contain chloride of sodium. Sodium is a prevailing element in the atmosphere; we are constantly breathing in portions of this elementary substance together with the air which we inhale. Two thirds of the earth’s surface is covered with salt water, and the fine spray which is continually being carried up into the air evaporates, leaving the minute specks of salt which we see dancing in the sunbeam. If I clap my hands, or if I shake my coat, or if I knock this dusty book, I think you will observe that this flame becomes yellow. This is not because it is the hand or coat of a chemist, but simply because the dust which everybody carries about with him is mixed with sodium compounds. If I place in this colourless flame the piece of platinum wire, which has been lying on the table for a few minutes since I heated it red hot, you see there is sodium in it.” (Littell’s Living Age, 4th series, Vol. 16 (1870), 653.)
- 24.
Gustav Kirchhoff, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 1882, 565; as translated in J. Mehra, H. Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1, Part 1 (Springer, 2000), 158.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
This account follows an anonymous article “Some scientific centres: the Heidelberg physical laboratory,” Nature, 65 (1902), 587–590.
- 27.
See Owen Gingerich, “The Nineteenth-Century Birth of Astrophysics” in Physics of Solar and Stellar Coronae: G. S. Vaiana Memorial Symposium, ed. J. F. Linsky, S. Serio (Kluwer;1992), 48.
- 28.
Foucault wrote about the discovery: “All these vapours vibrate like harps with a particular harmony, emitting into space luminous notes endowed with an unalterable timbre, and capable of crossing the greatest distances. Of what importance, then, the 30 million leagues that separate us from the Sun?” (W. Tobin, 2003, ibid, 112).
- 29.
Gustav Kirchhoff, “Über die Fraunhofer’schen Linien,”Monatsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin (1859), 662–65; translation by G. G. Stokes in Philosophical Magazine, series 4, 19 (1860), 195.
- 30.
Bunsen to Roscoe, translated by Roscoe in H. E. Roscoe, The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (Macmillan: London and New York: 1906), 81; as quoted in O. Gingerich, ibid, 47.
- 31.
Translated by F. Guthrie, Phil. Mag, Vol. 20, (1860), 1–21.
- 32.
Henry Roscoe, Ein Leben der Arbeit. Errinerungen, Leipzig (1919), as quoted in E. V. Shpol’skii, “A century of spectrum analysis,” Soviet Physics Uspekhi, Vol. 2 (1960), 967.
- 33.
As usual, there were a number of criticisms as well, including some that did not make much sense. A French astronomer Ch. Morren commented that Kirchhoff’s conclusions were premature: ‘D-lines are excited not only by sodium, but also by other metals, for example mercury and iron also give yellow lines; and therefore the conclusion as to the presence of sodium on the sun is not substantiated.’ (Ch. Morren, “Sur l’analyse spectrale,” Cosmos, Vol. 19 (1861), 557–560.)
- 34.
The first journal to put ‘astrophysics’ in its name was ‘Astronomy and Astro-physics’, first published in 1892. The first time the ‘new astronomy’ was used in literature was perhaps the long poem by Alfred Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall 60 years after’ (1889):
‘Warless? War will die out late then. Will it ever? Late or soon?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?
Dead the new astronomy calls her.--- On this day and at this hour…’
- 35.
Mary E. Weeks, “The discovery of the elements. XIII. Some spectroscopic discoveries,” Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 9 (8), 1932: 1413–1434.
- 36.
Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive II, 19th lesson (1835), quoted by J. B. Hearnshaw, The Analysis of Starlight (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1986), 1.
- 37.
E. W. Maunder, The Royal Observatory Greenwich (The Religious Tract Society: London, 1990), 266–267.
- 38.
William Huggins, “The New Astronomy: A personal retrospect,” The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 41 (1897), 911.
- 39.
A. J. Meadows, “The origins of astrophysics,” in The general history of astronomy, Vol. 4, Astrophysics and twentieth-century astronomy to 1950, Part A, ed. O. Gingerich, (Cambridge University Press, New York: 1984), 13.
- 40.
The text of Miller’s address was published in Chemical News, Vol. 5 (1862), 201–3, 214–218.
- 41.
It is possible that this tone of the talk came from professional jealousy. Miller had thought about the same ideas of Kirchhoff way back in 1845. William Crookes wrote in 1861 as the editor of Chemical News: “Professor Miller has anticipated, by nearly 18 years, the remarkable discovery, ascribed to Kirchhoff, of the opacity of certain coloured flames to light of their own colour.” [see, Barbara J. Becker, Unveiling starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the rise of the new astronomy, (Cambridge University Press: 2011), 48] This was criticized by Roscoe who wrote in a letter to G. Stokes that Miller’s “sentence on this subject is not only vague, but as I read it, positively incorrect.” [B. J. Becker, ibid, 49].
- 42.
William Huggins, ibid, 911–912.
- 43.
John Lankford, ‘Amateurs and Astrophysics: A Neglected Aspect in the Development of a Scientific Specialty,’ Social Studies of Science, Vol. 11 (1981), 275–303.
- 44.
Ibid., 277.
- 45.
Ibid., 280.
- 46.
Barbara J. Becker, “Celestial Spectroscopy: Making reality fit the myth,” Science, Vol. 301, Sept 5, 2003, 1332–1333.
- 47.
George Hale, “The work of Sir William Huggins,” Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 38 (1913), 145.
- 48.
Charles A Young, “Pending problems of astronomy,” Science, Vol. 4 (1884), 192–203.
- 49.
David Aubin, “Orchestrating observatory, laboratory, and field: Jules Janssen, the spectroscope, and travel,” Nuncius (2003), 617.
- 50.
William Huggins, ibid, 913.
- 51.
Admiral W. H. Smyth, Sidereal Chromatics (London:privately printed; 1864), 90.
- 52.
Joseph N. Lockyer, Contributions to Solar Physics, Macmillan (1874), xi.
- 53.
O. A. Melnikov, “Toward a history of the development of astrospectroscopy in Russia and the USSR” (in Russian), Istoriko-Astronomischeskie Issledovania, Vol. 57 (1957), 27 (as quoted in J. Meadows, “The origins of astrophysics: Following a revolutionary change in their discipline, modern astronomers ask questions about the universe totally different from those their predecessors asked in the nineteenth century,” American Scientist, Vol. 72 (1984), 273.)
- 54.
Barbara J. Becker, ibid,1332–1333.
- 55.
See M. A. Sutton, “Spectroscopy, historiography, and myth: Victorians vindicated,” History of Science, Vol. 24 (1986), 429.
- 56.
Agnes Clerke, History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century, 3rd ed. (Adam and Charles Black, London:1893), 210–212.
- 57.
A moving image of the couple during their observations appears in her memoirs. She wrote: ‘I observe while William looks after clock, dome, etc. When we first began, our exposures on each star had to be very long. I have, I think, worked on one for about three hours. But in our later work from three quarters to one and a half hours would be about the time. I had to teach myself what to do by degrees: at first I had my difficulties, but now my eyes are trained and are very sensitive. Also my hands respond very quickly and delicately to any sudden necessity. I can go and stand well at good heights on ladders and twist about well… As I observe, I direct William as to what I need and he moves me bodily on my ladder, so that I am not disturbed more than is necessary.’ (Charles E. Mills, C. F. Brooke, A Sketch of the Life of Sir William Huggins, K.C.B., O.M., London 1936, 38–40.)
- 58.
William Huggins, The New Astronomy (1897), 912.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 913.
- 60.
Joseph Norman Lockyer, a principal character in the story of helium, was a reviewer of scientific discoveries for The Reader and wrote enthusiastically about Huggins’s and Miller’s report.
- 61.
Airy received criticisms much later in 1872 for not championing the observations of spectroscopic observations at Greenwich. He argued that the new science of spectroscopy did not really fit into his understanding of Greenwich’s purpose [B. J. Becker, ibid, 63]. In later chapters, we will encounter more of Airy’s confrontation with another important astronomer in the story of helium, Norman Robert Pogson.
- 62.
Barbara J. Becker, ibid, 54.
- 63.
Another competitor from the United States was John William Draper, who was born and educated in England but had moved to Virginia in his twenties. He became a professor of chemistry at the City University of New York (now NYU), and became an ardent photographer in its earliest days. When Daguerreotypes reached New York, Draper started experimenting with it, and in three years, manage to take a photograph of the solar spectrum. His son, Henry, became one of the youngest medical graduates in the USA when he graduated at twenty- one, but astronomy was his passion. He made his own 15.5 inch telescope and used it for astronomical photography. In his endeavours, he was joined by his wife Anna who became his assistant in the observatory.
- 64.
William Huggins, On the results of spectral analysis applied to the heavenly bodies (W. Ladd, London; 1866), 30.
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Nath, B.B. (2013). From Chemistry to the Stars. In: The Story of Helium and the Birth of Astrophysics. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5363-5_3
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