The Glassmaker Who Sparked Astrophysics - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/the-glassmaker-who-sparked-astrophysics
The lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today, with high-powered telescopes and computers, still ponder the universe and attempt to tease out answers to millennia-old questions. But one of the most significant discoveries in this inquiry was not made with a high-powered telescope or a computer, or by anyone peering at the sky. Two hundred years ago, Joseph von Fraunhofer, a Bavarian glassmaker and researcher, experimented in his laboratory with simple equipment and detected dark lines in the spectrum of sunlight. He had no way of knowing (...)