Bunsen's tweaking of the burner design—Bunsen-like burners existed before their namesake—turned out to be vital to a larger goal: helping to pioneer the field of spectral analysis, or spectroscopy.
In spectral analysis, "every element sends out a specific color when heated with a flame," explained Bunsen scholar Christine Nawa.
"And only the Bunsen burner was able to create colorless, very hot flames, so that one could see the color of each element clearly," said Nawa, a visiting fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.
But of course, most of us only know him from his namesake, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew:
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