Early Life and Education
Robert Bunsen was born at Göttingen in 1811 (in what is now the state of Lower Saxony in Germany) but was then the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia; upon the defeat of Napoleon three years later it became the Kingdom of Hanover. Robert was the youngest of four sons of the University of Göttingen's chief librarian and professor of modern philology, Christian Bunsen (1770–1837). Sources disagree on Robert Bunsen's exact birth date. His parish register, as well as two curricula vitae, handwritten by Bunsen himself, support the claim that 30 March 1811 is Bunsen's true birth date; however, many later sources cite 31 March as the date. According to his biographer Georg Lockemann, Bunsen himself celebrated his birthday on the 31st in his later years. Lockemann nevertheless regarded the 30th as the correct date.
After attending school in Holzminden, Bunsen matriculated at Göttingen in 1828 and studied chemistry with Friedrich Stromeyer as well as mineralogy with Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann and mathematics with Carl Friedrich Gauss. After obtaining a Ph.D. in 1831, Bunsen spent 1832 and 1833 traveling in Germany, France, and Austria; Friedlieb Runge (who discovered aniline and in 1819 isolated caffeine), Justus von Liebig in Gießen, and Eilhard Mitscherlich in Bonn were among the many scientists he met on his journeys.
Read more about this topic: Robert Bunsen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)