BUNSEN, ROBERT WILHELM EBERHARD

(b. Göttingen, Kingdom of Westphalia, 30 March 1811; d. Heidelberg, Germany, 26 August 1899)

chemistry, analytical chemistry, spectroscopy. For the original article on Bunsen see DSB, vol. 2.

Bunsen is best remembered for inventing and teaching methods that were crucial to the development of nineteenth-century analytical chemistry—above all those on gasometry, photochemical induction, and spectral analysis. Furthermore, he made important improvements in instrumental techniques and had a sincere interest in geological matters. A good description of these topics is given in the original DSB article, though some of the dates are incorrect. Drawing on subsequent research, some of the stations of Bunsen’s life and work are recapitulated. In addition, a fuller assessment of Bunsen’s interdisciplinary research practices and his involvement in political matters are provided.

Career Path. Bunsen was born into a Protestant bourgeois family from the middle of what is modern day Germany. His father, at once professor of physical geography, rhetoric, Spanish, and Italian and sub-librarian at the University of Göttingen, worked hard to feed his family. But raising four sons and funding their studies (the eldest son, Carl, died in an accident when he was seventeen years old) left the finances running low. Unlike his brothers, Bunsen studied not law but sciences and mathematics. Among his teachers were such prominent scientists as Friedrich Stromeyer, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Wilhelm Weber, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann, and Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut.

When only twenty years old, Bunsen received his doctor’s degree for a thesis originally written—and awarded— as an answer to the yearly announced Preisfrage (essay competition) of the philosophical faculty. His final exams

took place in September 1831. In May 1832 Bunsen departed on a fifteen-month grand tour through Germany, France, Switzerland, Tyrol, and Austria. Subsequently he started to work on ammonia cyano compounds for his Habilitation in January 1834. Together with the physician Arnold Adolph Berthold, he then began research on iron oxide as an antidote to arsenic acid, the first in a number of successful interdisciplinary projects. In April 1834 he took up a lectureship as a Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen. After Stromeyer’s death in August 1835, he took over the main lecture until Friedrich Wöhler succeeded him. In return, in April 1836 Bunsen followed Wöhler as teacher at the vocational school (Höhere Gewerbeschule) in Kassel. Here he began to work on organo-arsenic compounds and continued this work, despite a bad accident in November 1836 which damaged his right eye, after being appointed professor of chemistry in Marburg in 1839.

Due to his increasing scientific reputation, built above all on his new gasometrical methods, Bunsen received a full professorship in 1841. Early in his career he developed an ongoing interest in technical-analytical

questions, which was to play a significant role in linking his various research interests throughout his life.

In April 1851 Bunsen succeeded to Nikolaus Wolfgang Fischer’s chair in Breslau. There he lectured on organic chemistry for the last time. In later years, his teaching focused on inorganic chemistry. Select parts of organic chemistry, however, were implemented in his experimental teaching. In the fall of 1852 he moved to Heidelberg as professor at the philosophical faculty and as director of the chemical laboratory. At the same time he received the title of Hofrath. Main achievements of his career in Heidelberg were the photochemical research undertaken with Henry Enfield Roscoe from 1853 onward, and the scientific foundation of spectral analysis together with Gustav Robert Kirchhoff in 1859–1860.

While the scientific and technical significance of Bunsen’s work is generally accepted, the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation in it is frequently underestimated. Particularly the great inventions in photochemistry and spectroscopy would not have been possible, had he not been part of the well-developed experimental culture in Heidelberg at that time, the main features of which were the application of physical methods to chemical and physiological questions and the transfer of methods across disciplinary boundaries by means of scientific instruments.

Social Context. Subsequent research has shown that the emergence of this specific cultural setting was the result of both Baden’s successful science policy, and Bunsen’s own role in deliberately using academic employment policy for the creation of interdisciplinary networks. The nucleus of the Heidelberg network was built by Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Hermann von Helmholtz, Leo Königsberger, and, later on, Hermann Kopp. Their achievements, however, depended on the services and know-how of a group of assistants, instrument makers, mechanics and draftsmen, for example, the famous Munich instrument maker Carl August von Steinheil, who supplied the lenses for the first spectrometer, or Heidelberg’s university mechanic Peter Desaga, who provided Bunsen’s laboratory with the famous burners and whose company, later on, specialized in Bunsensche Apparate, or the almost anonymous painter Friedrich Veith, whose pencil drawings of instruments were used for publications.

Little is known about Bunsen’s political, and even less about his religious, position. But from his letters, from his actions and social relationships an antireactionary attitude can be inferred. Even though Bunsen played no active role in politics, Roscoe described him as a “staunch Liberal” (Roscoe, 1900, p. 552). While earlier research characterized Bunsen as apolitical, or, at best, hostile to Prussian politics, later research highlights his being part of a close network of liberal and politically active scholars such as Ludwig Häusser and Georg Gottfried Gervinus. Furthermore three of Bunsen’s cousins, Gustav, Georg, and Karl Bunsen were active in the Vormärz era.

Bunsen’s letters, especially those to his favorite pupil and friend Roscoe—in his later years a liberal member of Parliament for Manchester South—show him as a well-informed spectator of international politics who was well aware of the impact of political events upon university life and who knew how to interpret them for local purposes such as university politics. Thus it is by no means coincidental that Bunsen followed vocations from universities in more liberal states whenever the situation at his prior institution was worsening, a strategy that clearly demonstrates the close relationship between the careers of single scientists and science politics in the different territories of nineteenth-century Germany, which were competing for cultural excellence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Important archival resources lie in the Deutsches Museum Munich, Germany (foremost letters to colleagues), and the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Germany (a part of his literary remains, and some pupils’ notes on Bunsen’s lectures).

Boberlin, Ursula. Photochemische Untersuchungen von R. Bunsen und H. Roscoe im Vergleich mit den Arbeiten J. W. Drapers und W. C. Wittwers. Die Anfänge der quantitativen Photochemie im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Köster, 1993.

Borscheid, Peter. Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden (1848–1914). Stuttgart: Klett, 1976.

HobHitzel, Stephanie Brigitte. “Es lebt sich himmlisch in Heidelberg.” Robert Wilhelm Bunsen und seine Korrespondenz. PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 2003. Not in all aspects reliable.

James, Frank A. L. J. “Science as a Cultural Ornament: Bunsen, Kirchhoff and Helmholtz in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Baden.” Ambix 42 (1995): pt. 1, 1–9.

Jungnickel, Christa, and Russell McCormmach. “Kirchhoff and Helmholtz at Heidelberg: Relations of Physics to Chemistry and Physiology.” In Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein. Volume 1: The Torch of Mathematics, 1800–1870, by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Roscoe, Henry Enfield. The Life & Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, Written by Himself. London: Macmillan, 1906.

Roscoe, Henry Enfield. “Bunsen Memorial Lecture.” Journal of the Chemical Society 77 (1900): pt. 1, 513–554.

Stock, Christine. Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz vor dem Antritt der Heidelberger Professur (1852) – Kritische Edition. PhD diss., University of Marburg, 2005. (To be published by Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Stuttgart, series “Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie,” in 2007.)

Tuchman, Arleen Marcia. Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany. The Case of Baden, 1815–1871. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Christine Nawa