A Timeline of Atomic Spectroscopy

While perhaps the most extensive such timeline to date, it is surely not complete. Sources for further information have been provided.

Figure 1: Sir Lsaac Newton.
1666: Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (Figure 1) shows that the white light from the sun could be dispersed into a continuous series of colors. He coined the word "spectrum." His apparatus, an aperture to define a light beam, a lens, a prism, and a screen, was the first spectroscope. He suggested that light was composed of minute corpuscles (particles) moving at high speed.

1678: Dutch mathematician and physicist Christian Huygens (1629–1695) proposes the wave theory of light.

1729: French mathematician and scientist Pierre Bougeur (1698–1758) notes that the amount of light passing through a liquid sample decreases with increasing sample thickness.

1752: Thomas Melville (1726–1753) of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, observes a bright yellow light emitted from a flame produced by burning a mixture of alcohol and sea salt. When the salt is removed, the yellow color disappears.

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