München 2019 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 6: Tools and Technologies of physics research

GP 6.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 14:45–15:15, HS 9

Fraunhofer's colored solar spectra and his prism spectrometer — •Jürgen Teichmann — Deutsches Museum, München, Museumsinsel 1

Around 1813/1814 (published 1817) Joseph Fraunhofer discovered several hundred dark lines in the solar spectrum. A new found letter from 1823 proves, that at this date he tried to color his black and white figure printed 1817 from an copper etching, which he had made by his own hands. Three such hand colored spectra remained till today, two of them in the Deutsches Museum, Munich, one in the Goethe-Museum, Weimar.

Also the prism spectrometer which he used and some of his first diffraction gratings exist in the Deutsches Museum. To what extent all these objects originate directly from Fraunhofer? Which importance had they for his research, for the discussion in his scientific environment and as objects of a self standing parallel world, of which the signs and its experimental character stayed to be exotic for most scientists before their explanation as absorption lines in 1859 (and also stayed to be strange for a big amount of scientists decades after this year)?