Robert Bunsen

Robert Bunsen never married. He was totally dedicated to his profession and was a very popular and much-loved scientist. As a teacher he doted on his students who also returned his affection.

He remained active until the very end of his life. Following his retirement at the age of 78, he focused his interest on geology and mineralogy. He died on 16 August 1899 at the age of 88.

Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was born on 30 March 1811, in Göttingen, Westphalia, Rhine Confederation (now Germany) to Christian Bunsen and his wife, as the youngest of four sons. His father was the University of Göttingen's chief librarian and professor of modern philology while his mother was the daughter of a British-Hanoverian officer.

He graduated from the Gymnasium at Holzminden in 1828 following which he joined the University of Göttingen where he studied chemistry, physics, mineralogy, and mathematics. He was educated under the guidance of teachers such as Friedrich Stromeyer, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann, and Carl Friedrich Gauss.

He completed his doctorate in 1831 and spent the next couple of years travelling in Germany, France, and Austria. His journeys were enriching ones and he met several prominent scientists including Freidlieb Runge, Justus Liebig, Eilhard Mitcherlich, Henri-Victor Regnault, Théophile Pelouze, and César Despretz.

He began his academic career in 1833, becoming a lecturer at Göttingen. From the very beginning, he started experimenting in the laboratory. His initial experiments were on the (in) solubility of metal salts of arsenous acid. The experiments were of a very dangerous nature and he almost lost his life to arsenic poisoning.

In 1836, Bunsen succeeded Friedrich Wöhler at the Polytechnic School of Kassel. He worked there for three years before taking up the position of an associate professor at the University of Marburg. He was made a full professor in 1841.

By this time he was beginning to get much recognition for his chemical experiments with dangerous substances. One of his major inventions, the Bunsen cell battery, using a carbon electrode instead of the expensive platinum electrode, was also made in 1841.

He was known to risk his own safety and health in the pursuit of scientific discoveries. In 1843, he lost the use of his right eye in an explosion of cacodyl cyanide, an extremely toxic substance that undergoes spontaneous combustion in dry air.

He became a professor at the University of Breslau in 1851. There he met Gustav Kirchhoff, with who he would later collaborate to perform important research in spectroscopy.

Working along with his laboratory assistant Peter Desaga, Robert Bunsen designed a burner that produces a single open gas flame, which is used for heating, sterilization, and combustion. The burners, known as Bunsen burners, are used in laboratories all around the world.

He invented the Bunsen cell by improving upon the Grove cell designed by William Robert Grove. Bunsen replaced the Grove cell’s expensive platinum cathode with carbon in the form of pulverized coal and coke.