The Glassmaker Who Sparked Astrophysics

The lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today, with high-powered telescopes and computers, still ponder the universe and attempt to tease out answers to millennia-old questions.

But one of the most significant discoveries in this inquiry was not made with a high-powered telescope or a computer, or by anyone peering at the sky. Two hundred years ago, Joseph von Fraunhofer, a Bavarian glassmaker and researcher, experimented in his laboratory with simple equipment and detected dark lines in the spectrum of sunlight. He had no way of knowing that this curious discovery would allow future scientists to calculate the distances of stars and precipitate one of the most momentous advances in the history of all science—the recognition that the universe is expanding.

Joseph Fraunhofer was born on March 6, 1787, in Straubing, in lower Bavaria. On both his father’s and his mother’s sides, his forebears had had links to glass production for generations. Joseph, the youngest of 11 children, likely worked in his father’s shop. When Joseph was 10, his mother died; his father died a year or two later, and Joseph’s guardians sent him to Munich to apprentice with the glassmaker Philipp Anton Weichselberger, who produced mirrors and decorative glass for the court. This should have been an enviable apprenticeship, but Weichselberger was a harsh master who gave his apprentices menial tasks and taught them little about glassmaking. He prevented Joseph from reading the science books he loved by refusing him a reading lamp at night and forbade his attending the Sunday classes that offered Munich apprentices some education outside the trade.