<p><strong>Powered by a virtual Bunsen burner, Thursday's <a href="http://www.google.com/doodle4google/history.html">Google doodle</a> celebrates the 200th birthday of <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/84752/Robert-Wilhelm-Bunsen">Robert Bunsen</a>. But the German chemist accomplished a lot more than perfecting the iconic little lab stoves (pictured in a file photo of men testing fire retardants).</strong></p><p>Bunsen's tweaking of the burner design—Bunsen-like burners existed before their namesake—turned out to be vital to a larger goal: helping to pioneer the field of spectral analysis, or spectroscopy.</p><p>In spectral analysis, "every element sends out a specific color when heated with a flame," explained Bunsen scholar Christine Nawa.</p><p>"And only the Bunsen burner was able to create colorless, very hot flames, so that one could see the color of each element clearly," said Nawa, a visiting fellow at the<a href="http://www.chemheritage.org/"> Chemical Heritage Foundation</a> in Philadelphia.</p><p><em>—Brian Handwerk</em></p>