A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century: Fourth EditionClerke, Agnes M. (Agnes Mary)
History
A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century: Fourth Edition
Clerke, Agnes M. (Agnes Mary)
Astronomy -- History -- 19th century
A. J. Ångström of Upsala takes rank after Kirchhoff as a subordinate
founder, so to speak, of solar spectroscopy. His great map of the
"normal" solar spectrum[665] was published in 1868, two years before he
died. Robert Thalèn was his coadjutor in its execution, and the immense
labour which it cost was amply repaid by its eminent and lasting
usefulness. For more than a score of years it held its ground as the
universal standard of reference in all spectroscopic inquiries within
the range of the _visible_ emanations. Those that are invisible by
reason of the quickness of their vibrations were mapped by Dr. Henry
Draper, of New York, in 1873, and with superior accuracy by M. Cornu in
1881. The infra-red part of the spectrum, investigated by Langley,
Abney, and Knut Ångström, reaches perhaps no definite end. The
radiations oscillating too slowly to affect the eye as light may pass by
insensible gradations into the long Hertzian waves of electricity.[666]
Professor Rowland's photographic map of the solar spectrum, published in
1886, and in a second enlarged edition in 1889, opened fresh
possibilities for its study, from far down in the red to high up in the
ultra-violet, and the accompanying scale of absolute wave-lengths[667]
has been, with trifling modifications, universally adopted. His new
table of standard solar lines was published in 1893.[668] Through his
work, indeed, knowledge of the solar spectrum so far outstripped
knowledge of terrestrial spectra, that the recognition of their common
constituents was hampered by intolerable uncertainties. Thousands of the
solar lines charted with minute precision remained unidentified for want
of a corresponding precision in the registration of metallic lines.
Rowland himself, however, undertook to provide a remedy. Aided by Lewis
E. Jewell, he redetermined, at the Johns Hopkins University, the
wave-lengths of about 16,000 solar lines,[669] photographing for
comparison with them the spectra of all the known chemical elements
except gallium, of which he could procure no specimen. The labour of
collation was well advanced when he died at the age of fifty-two, April
16, 1901. Investigations of metallic arc-spectra have also been carried
out with signal success by Hasselberg,[670] Kayser and Runge, O.
Lohse,[671] and others.
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