A study of interferences in flame photometry

During the last hundred years, flame spectra have been used for the qualitative identification of elements. It was not until 1929 that Lundergardh (17) published a treatise on the quantitative determination of elements using flame spectra. Lundergardh sprayed the solution being analyzed into a flame placed in front of a spectrograph, the spectral lines being photographed and the optical densities of the lines correlated with chemical concentrations. Within the last eight years, a number of papers on flame photometry have appeared in this country, the first appearing in 1939 (12). The spectrographic method was tedious and limited to the reproducibility of the photographs; therefore, direct-reading flame photometers were developed. The first direct-reading flame photometers were supplied by Germany, but in 1945 one such instrument was described in this country.