A brief history of spectroscopy

1621

Willebrord Snell (1591 - 1626, Dutch mathematician) derives the law of refraction using tables.

1690

Christian Huygens (1629 - 1695, Holland) formulates Huygens' principle in his book "Traite de la Lumiere".

1704

Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727, England) describes his investigations of splitting up white (sun-)light into colors using prisms in his book "Opticks".

1801

Thomas Young (1773 - 1829, England) demonstrates the wave character of light with his double slit experiment.

1814

Joseph v. Fraunhofer (1787 - 1826, Germany) (re-)discovers the dark lines in the spectrum of the Sun and assigns letters to them.

1859

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824 - 1887, Germany) invents the spectroscope and explains the absorption lines (together with Bunsen).

1860

Kirchhoff formulates his radiation law.

1865

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879, Scotland) describes the nature of light as electromagnetic waves.

1900

Max Planck (1858 - 1947, Germany) discovers the quantisation of the energy of electromagnetic waves and formulates the radiation law for black body radiation.