Robert BunsenEssay Preview: Robert BunsenReport this essayRobert Bunsen was born on March 31, 1811 in Gottingen, Germany. He was the youngest of four sons. Robert started schooling in the city of Holzminden, and then studied chemistry at Gottingen. Bunsen was awarded his doctorate in 1830 for a dissertation on different kinds of hygrometer. He was only 19 at this point in his life. Following being awarded his doctorate, he immediately set off on extensive travels that took him through Germany and Paris and eventually to Vienna from 1830 to 1833. All of his travels allowed Bunsen the opportunity to establish a network of contacts that would stay with him throughout his illustrious career.
Robert’s mother, Mary Bunsen, died in 1840 at the age of 44. His father, Henry Bunsen made the transition away from academia into a part-time professor at a local hospital in Wachil. He remained there from the age of seven through fifteen, having his full time education until being transferred to a post at Oxford University, where he was offered a post at the post of head of department. But his interest in medicine didn’t wane. He soon began living as a student at the British Society of Psychiatry, an institution that he later joined in his college career. After briefly joining the British Society of Mental Health, which he continued to operate, he began his work in the mid-1840s. Between 1920 and 1943, after a career in a variety of different fields, he worked in psychiatric clinics, giving patients medication he found there that provided relief from their own depression. He eventually started working with the Hildegard Trust hospital in the late 1920s to alleviate a few of Hildegard’s patients who had taken too much medicine. These patients included some patients from the French and Austrian countries who he brought back into the United States through a medical referral through Dr. Frank Loh, whose home was located in the French National Hospital for Neurology and Hospital for Disease Control and Prevention (UNKNOWN). In 1942 his research led to a collaboration with the Swiss physician Frank Hoh, who is now at the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Psychoetics and Pathology. Under the guidance of Hoh, Bunsen was able to help other patients gain an understanding of his condition, which ultimately led to a plan to try drugs that caused a reduction in the risk of developing chronic mental illness when it occurred. The project was named after his family’s home base. During World War II, many residents of Hildegard were known to find their own treatments for mental health issues and often the drug was prescribed by a doctor. In the summer before the war, Bunsen and a small number of others became ill at various times in the fall following many patients’s attempts to take their medication without success. The next year on November 24, 1943, Bunsen’s son Robert took the first step toward recovery when he began practicing medicine in Wachil without anesthesia. His mother Mary was hospitalized for an unspecified amount of time of 5 days. He made this long commitment to the cause of his mother’s demise and continued to
Bunsen returned to Germany and became a lecturer at Gottingen. Robert began his experimental studies of the insolubility of metal salts of arsenious acid. Because of this experimenting he discovered the use of iron oxide hydrate as a precipitating agent which is still the best known antidote against arsenic poisoning to this day. Bunsen gained his Habilitation with work on these organometallic compounds in two years.
After many years of study Robert Bunsen invented one of the most well known chemists tools. He invented the Bunsen burner sometime in 1855 in attempt to find a better lighting and heating source in the laboratory. The idea for the Bunsen burner was simple. He proposed mixing the gas with air before combustion instead of the other way around. The university mechanic, Peter Desaga, designed and built the burner according to Bunsens specifications. Peter Desaga contributed to the modern design of the two large holes with a rotatable, perforated ring. Others began to produce their own versions of the Bunsen burner and even tried to claim the invention as their own. Bunsen and Desaga were able to have the proper authorities refute these claims.
Soon after the invention of the Bunsen burner, Robert and Kirchhoff invented the Bunsen-Kirchhoff spectroscope. This was a vital instrument of chemical analysis that can trace ancestry to such simple components as a “prism, a cigar box, and two ends of otherwise unusable old telescopes. This invention proved to be of tremendous importance in chemical