Chemistry of Colored Flames Kit B (w/Bunsen Burner) (Item 7539)

In 1859 Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen, working with a young Prussian chemist Gustav Kirchoff (who had an idea to utilize a prism to separate light from similarly colored flames into its various individual colors or spectra), developed the science of spectroscopy. They found that to better study the spectra of a substance placed into a flame that the flame needed to be of a very high temperature and a very low luminescence. That is, the flame had to produce almost no color of its own. Working with the gas burners available at the time, Bunsen and Kirchoff, along with Peter Desaga, developed just such a burner and it quickly, and ever after, became known as the ¿Bunsen burner¿.

            Bunsen and Kirchoff invented the Bunsen-Kirchoff spectroscope using a prism, cigar box and the ends of two old telescopes. This instrument became one of the most useful pieces of laboratory equipment for chemical analysis and for the discovery of new chemical elements.

            Each chemical element has a unique light spectrum when its atoms are heated (excited) in a flame. Often the colors of a given chemical element are quite intense. The colors we see are the result of the electrons in the excited atoms being forced into higher energy states and then falling to lower energy states when the atoms cool. When the electrons return to the lower energy state the energy they absorbed when heated is emitted as light. The light that is emitted in the visible region is what our eyes perceive as colors. The actual colors of light emitted are unique for each element. This is how the element helium was discovered in the spectral analysis of the light emitted by our sun. This property of chemical elements that allow colors to be imparted to fireplace fires and to fireworks forms the basis of modern chemical analysis as done by flame photometry and atomic absorption spectroscopy.