born March 6, 1787, Straubing, Bavaria [Germany] died June 7, 1826, Munich
Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
By far the richest clues about the structure of the atom came from spectral line series. Mounting a particularly fine prism on a telescope, the German physicist and optician Joseph von Fraunhofer had discovered between 1814 and 1824 hundreds of dark lines in the spectrum of the Sun. He labeled the most prominent of these lines with the letters A through G. Together they are now called...
in Sun: History of observation )...basis for analytical spectroscopy is the discovery, made in 1859 by the German physicist Gustav R. Kirchhoff, that each pure substance has its own characteristic spectrum. Another German physicist, Joseph von Fraunhofer, repeating more carefully an earlier experiment by a British scientist, William Wollaston, had shown in 1814 that the spectrum of the Sun’s electromagnetic radiation does not...
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