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---
  layout: post
  title: National Bunsen Burner Day
  author: Joe Schwarcz
  source: McGill Blogs
---
  HYPERLINK
"http://blogs.mcgill.ca/oss/2016/04/14/national-bunsen-burner-day/" 
National Bunsen Burner Day 

  March 31st was National Bunsen Burner Day. Bunsen (1811-1899) should
be remembered. After all, the “Bunsen Burner” is a typical symbol of
chemistry. But there is more to Bunsen than just a burner.

Laboratory workers had long been plagued by sooty, hard-to-control
flames and Bunsen of course knew that oxygen was necessary for
combustion and that soot was the product of incomplete combustion. He
therefore concluded that the secret to a clean flame lay in mixing the
combustible gas with air in just the right proportion.

The prototype Bunsen burner consisted of a metal tube with strategically
drilled holes through which air could enter and mix with the combustible
gas flowing through the tube. A sliding metal cover allowed the operator
to vary the number of open holes and thus control the character of the
flame. Bunsen, however, never patented his invention. He did not believe
that scientists should profit financially from their work; research was
to be done for its own sake.

Why was Bunsen so interested in developing a clean flame? Because he had
a passion for studying the diverse brilliant colors produced by
sprinkling various substances into a fire. He had noted that throwing
sodium chloride (ordinary salt) into a flame always resulted in a bright
orange-yellow glow. The same color appeared if sodium bromide, or indeed
any compound of sodium was cast into the flame. Other elements also
produced characteristic colors. In fact Bunsen discovered the existence
of the elements rubidium and cesium through the colors they produced.

Over a hundred years earlier, Newton had shown how a prism can be used
to separate white light into the colors of the rainbow. Bunsen now
applied this principle to separate the colors of a flame into their
individual components. The spectroscope, an instrument he developed
together with the physicist Kirchoff, allowed unknown substances to be
identified purely by the colors they produced when heated in the flame
of a Bunsen burner.

So, who cares what colors are produced in a flame? Well, just think of
the glorious colors of fireworks. Or the bright red strontium flame of
an emergency roadside flare. Or the yellow glow of a sodium vapor
highway light. The original studies that led to these applications were
painstakingly carried out by Robert Bunsen.

After having long toiled with flames and spectroscopes in the
laboratory, the great man spent years writing up his work for
publication. The day the manuscript was finished, he left it on his desk
and went out to celebrate. When he returned, Bunsen was horrified to see
a smoldering pile of ashes where his treasured treatise had been.

A flask filled with water had been next to the papers and had acted as a
magnifying glass, focussing the sun’s rays and igniting the
manuscript. A lesser man would have surrendered to fate at this point.
But Bunsen, even at an advanced age, doggedly repeated the work and
eventually published the results of his spectroscopic research so that
all the world finally became aware of his burner.

 

Joe Schwarcz PhD – April 14th/2016