334 NINETEENTH CENTURY. W. HI. 



or large slit in the shutter as Newton had done, he made 

 only a very thin slit, so that the colours of the spectrum 

 were prevented from overlapping each other, as they had 

 done in Newton's experiment. The result was that seven 

 clnrk upright lines or spaces appeared in the band of colour, 

 which seemed to show that no light fell on those parts. 

 Wollaston did nothing more than point out the existence of 

 these lines \ but in 1814 Fraunhofer, a German optician, 

 who had heard nothing of Wollaston's experiment, discovered 

 them over again independently, and learnt more about them. 



Fraunhofer, 1787-1826. Joseph Fraunhofer, the son 

 of a glazier, was born in 1787, at Straubing, in Bavaria. 

 Being left an orphan when quite young, he was apprenticed 

 to a glass manufacturer, who kept him hard at work all day. 

 But he longed so much for knowledge that he borrowed 

 some old books and spent his nights in learning. In the 

 year 1801 the house in which he lived fell down one night 

 and killed all the people in it except young Fraunhofer, 

 and his cries being heard by the people outside, they set to 

 work to try and release him. It happened that Maximilian 

 Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, came to see the accident, and 

 he encouraged the workmen so much, that in four hours the 

 young man was dug out, wounded, but alive. The Elector 

 was so much interested in this narrow escape, that he gave 

 Fraunhofer eighteen ducats, and the lad used the money to 

 buy himself off from his apprenticeship in order to have some 

 free time for study. After this he lived by polishing lenses, 

 and he worked so well that he soon t^came the master of 

 a business, and was able 1o spend his spare time in the study 

 of Physics and Astronomy, which he loved passionately. 

 Finally he became manager of the physical laboratory of 'an 

 academy in the town of Benedictbaiern, near Munich. 



Fraunhofer's Discoveries about the Spectrum, 1814, 



