Bringing the stellar universe into the laboratory

KIRCHHOFF, Gustav Robert.

Untersuchungen über das Sonnenspectrum und die Spectren der chemischen Elemente. [Erster Teil] - Zweiter Teil.

Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1862.

2nd Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #003301

Two volumes. Offprints from: Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1861-1862. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmler, 1862-1863. 4to (305 x 238 mm). [4], 43 [1]; [3] 4-16 pp., 5 lithographed plates (3 for part I and 2 for part II; 4 folding). Pages of part II unopened. Original printed boards, part I cloth backed, part II printed paper spine (minor soiling and spotting of covers, slight wear to extremities, spine of part II rubbed and partly split at head). Text generally crisp and clean with only minor age-toning, little spotting of part II, minor dust-soiling to outer margins of plates in part I. Cutout of newspaper article dated 2. February 1866 pasted to inner front-cover of part I. A very good, unsophisticated set, free of library stamps or markings. ----

PMM 278b; Horblit 59; Sparrow 117; Norman 1219 (all for 1st ed. of part 1); DSB VII, p.379-82. - ENLARGED SECOND EDITION OF PART I, FIRST EDITION OF PART II, OFFPRINT ISSUE, with "Zweite, durch einen Anhang vermehrte Ausgabe" on the front cover of Part 1. "Kirchhoff found that by exposing in the flame of a Bunsen burner a platinum wire dipped in salt he obtained in the spectrum the characteristic bright yellow lines of sodium superimposed on the spectrum of platinum. By repeating the process and introducing vaporized sodium between the incandescent wire and the screen, the yellow lines were replaced by dark lines. With great ingenuity he repeated the experiment with sunlight and got the same result. The fact that the dark lines were produced when a beam of light from an incandescent element passed through the same substance at a lower temperature suggested that this was due to absorption. In the solar spectrum, for example, the dark lines were caused by absorption in the gases of the sun's atmosphere . . . With these experiments Kirchhoff and his colleague Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (1811-1899), inventor of the eponymous burner, created the new science of spectroscopy, brought "the stellar universe into the laboratory and showed that the basic materials of the universe are everywhere the same" (PMM 278b). Kirchhoff "was able to elaborate a quantitative relationship between the absorptive and emissive power of electromagnetic radiation for all material bodies, as a universal function of wavelength and temperature. "Thus Kirchhoff's law was the key to the whole thermodynamics of radiation. In the hands of Planck . . . it proved to be the key to the new world of quanta, well beyond Kirchhoff's conceptual horizon" (DSB).

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