Balmer, Johann Jakob

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The name of Johann Jakob Balmer is immortalized in the Balmer series of spectral lines emitted from the hydrogen atom. Atoms that are excited to higher energies return to lower energies by emitting electromagnetic radiation at specific frequencies. Gustav Kirchhoff had shown in 1859 that each element has its own unique spectrum, but attempts to predict the frequencies of these spectral lines were tmsuccessful until Balmer. 

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Anfinsen, Christian Arrhenius, Svante Avery, Oswald Avogadro, Amedeo Baekeland, Leo Balmer, Johann Jakob Bardeen, John Becquerel, Antoine-Henri Berg, Paul... 

Balmer, Johann Jakob (1825-98) Swiss mathematician who, in 1885, empirically derived a simple formula for the wavelengths of the spectral lines of hydrogen. This is called the Balmer series, and Balmer could not explain it, but its quantitative element was important in developing atomic theory. Later, better models of the atom accounted for the series. 

It is more than a hundred years since JOHANN JAKOB BALMER, a schoolteacher and privatdocent in Basle, a man coming up to 60 years old, gave us, in 1885. the first clue to the understanding of the hydrogen spectrum [22]. 

From 1859 until his death at age seventy-three, Johann Jakob Balmer (1825-1898) was a high-school teacher at a girls school in Basel, Switzerland. His primary academic interest was geometry, but in the mid-1880s he became fascinated with four numbers 6,562.10, 4,860.74, 4,340.1, and 4,101.2. These are not pretty numbers, but for the mathematician Balmer, they became an intriguing puzzle Was there a pattern to the four numbers that could be represented mathematically The specific numbers that commanded Balmer s attention were four of many, many such numbers Balmer could have examined. But the four numbers Balmer chose were special because these numbers pertained to the atom of hydrogen. We shall return to these numbers shortly. 

Johann Jakob Balmer, Annalen der Physik und Chemie 25, 80-85 (1885). 

O Connor, J. J., and Robertson, E. F. Johann Jakob Balmer. Available from . 

The first of these series to be discovered was the BALMER SERIES in which = 2, 2 = 3,4,5,... This series is in the visible region and was discovered by the Swiss mathematician and physicist Johann Jakob Balmer (1825-1898) in 1885. The series in which i = 1 is the LYMAN series which lies in the ultraviolet region. This series was discovered by the American physicist Theodore Lyman (1874-1954). The Lyman series is a conspicuous feature of the spectrum of the Sun. 

Bohr felt instinctively that Planck s quantized energies were related to the discrete lines of elemental spectra— and to the planetary model of the atom— but he could not find the connection. Thirty years earlier Johann Jakob Balmer, a teacher at a girls secondary school, part-time lecturer at the University of Basel (where, we may note, Paracelsus burned the works of Galen), and mathematics hobbyist had found a numerical relationship between frequencies of the lines in the hydrogen spectrum. The relationship was not obvious because it depended on the reciprocal squares of integers, and this was the very feature that caught Bohr s attention. He later said, As soon as I saw Balmer s formula, the whole thing was immediately clear to me. ... 

Johann Jakob Balmer (1825-1898). Swiss matheinatician. From 1859 until his death in 1898 Balmer taught math at a secondary school for girls in Basel, Switzerland. Although physicists did not understand why his equation woilced until long after his death, the visible series of lines in the spectrum of hydrogen is named for him. 

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