Heinrich Gustav Johannes Kayser ForMemRS[Matthias Dörries and Klaus Hentschel (eds.), Heinrich Kayser, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft, Munich, 1996. .]
Biography
Kayser was born at Bingen am Rhein. Kayser's early work was concerned with the characteristics of acoustic waves.
He discovered the occurrence of
helium in the Earth's atmosphere in 1868 during a
solar eclipse when he detected a new
spectral line in the solar spectrum. In 1881, Kayser coined the word "
adsorption". Together with
Carl Runge, he examined the spectra of
.
[Kayser, H., & Runge, C. (1892). Über die Spektra der Elemente. Berliner Akademie, 1892.][Kayser, Heinrich, and Carl Runge. (1893). Uber die Spectren der elemente. Verlag der Könogl. Akademie der Wissenschaften.] This included the determination of the wavelengths, brightness and sharpness of 4500 lines from the spectrum of iron, an element chosen to act as the standard, as well as 2000 lines for carbon, since iron was vaporised in a carbon arc. The work was later extended to other elements and they developed empirical formulas for the inverse of the wavelength of the type:
, where
are constants and
is any positive integer. However, these formulas were superseded by the one by
Rydberg formula. After the conclusion of his collaboration with Runge, he seems to have mostly diverted his research from spectroscopy.
In 1905, he wrote a paper on
electron theory.
[Kayser, Heinrich. (1905). Die elektronentheorie. DC Heath & Company.]
The wavenumber unit, associated with wavenumber, of the CGS system was named after him, with his early recognition of the importance of the inverse wavelength measurements in vacuum rather than in air cited as a reason.
Works
-
Lehrbuch der Physik für Studierende . Enke, Stuttgart 3rd ed. 1900 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
External links
