Kirchhoff, Gustav Robert

"Untersuchungen über das Sonnenspectrum und die Spectren der chemischen Elemente" In Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1861-1862. Berlin: Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1862-1863



2 volumes, 4to (11 3/8 x 9 1/8 in.; 288 x 232 mm, unopened). Half-titles, 44 plates and 2 maps of which 5 plates (4 double-page folding lithographs and 1 full-page engraving) accompany the Kirchhoff; occasional marginal spotting heavier in the preliminary leaves. Original blue flexible boards (1861) and wrappers (1862), printed paper year labels on spines. Black cloth drop-boxes with blue sides.

Grolier / Horblit 59; Norman 1219; PMM 278b; see DSB VII:379-382

First edition, the foundation of the method of spectral analysis.

"Working with Robert Bunsen [whom he had befriended at Heidelberg in 1851], Kirchhoff founded and developed the method of spectral analysis, ascribing to each metal its unique and characteristic line spectrum by burning pure metal salts in Bunsen's recently invented burner, and using a specially constructed spectroscope to determine accurately the positions of each metal's spectral lines. The two thus established a new and highly accurate means of chemical analysis, which, in the next twenty years, made possible the discovery of five new elements" (Norman). "Immense prospects thus opened up of ascertaining the chemical compositions of the sun and other stars from the study of their optical spectra" (DSB).

He 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).