Special Guest Blogger: Robert Bunsen

I invented many things but not the Bunsen burner. I was a German chemist and teacher who devised or improved the design of a number of pieces of laboratory equipment which you still use today. However, the item i am most famous for was actually invented by the English chemist Michael Faraday.
I first became renowned in the scientific community for my work on arsenic and discovered the only known antidote to the poison, iron oxide hydrate, but not before losing my sight in one eye and almost dying of arsenic poisoning when some of it got in my eye after it exploded.
 I went on to produce a galvanic battery that used a carbon element instead of the much more expensive platinum and solved the riddle of how geysers worked by building a working model in my lab.
The need for a new style of burner grew out of my work with physicist called Gustav Kirchoff and together we pioneered the technique that became known as spectroscopy by filtering light through a prism and discovered that every element had its own signature spectrum. Very pretty it was too.
In order to produce this light by heating different materials, we needed a flame that was very hot but not very bright and I developed this new heat source using Faraday’s burner as a starting point. I took my ideas to Desaga, who built the prototype in 1855 and within five years our lab became famous, and brought me international renown.
So how did it get named after me? My family had the rights to sell it and they named it Bunsen's Burner so I got famous for inventing something i didn't really invent when the other work i did was so extraordinary but at least i get a name call every time a student sets fire to their stupid fringe in Chemistry lessons.