Image credit: IANS CHENNAI: More than 120 years ago, a 16-year old student peered into a spectrophotometer at the department of physical sciences at Presidency College. The boy, named C V Raman, went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics for the phenomenon called Raman effect that explained, among other things, why the sea looks blue. As Presidency College enters the 150th year of its existence, the department of physics is planning to restore the spectrophotometer Raman had used for his first experiment.
Presidency College started in 1840, but the department of physical science (physics and chemistry) was created only in 1875, with William Henry Wilson as the first professor. “Professor Wilson, without any assistance, built the department. Soon, he started planning the laboratories and equipping them,” says ‘Hundred Years of Chemistry,’ a book published by the department of chemistry.
Raman joined Presidency College in 1902 and studied under Professor R L L Jones. Using the spectrophotometer, Raman observed some diffraction bands. His investigations led to his first science paper, “Unsymmetrical diffraction bands due to rectangular aperture,” published in The Philosophical Magazine, London in 1906.
In the same journal the following year he published another paper, on the demonstration of curvature methods for determining the surface tension of liquids. This instrument, produced in Skinningrove village in North Yorkshire, England, was used to measure the intensity.