Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy is a Technique that manages the absorption of electromagnetic radiation of free gaseous molecules at a particular wavelength. AAS permits the measurement of extremely tiny quantities of components and is extensively used around the world in medicine, manufacturing, mining, environmental monitoring, and labs. Spectroscopy can be traced back to 1648, when Marcus Marci von Kron land, a Bohemian physicist, discussed optics, colour and rainbow in his book titled Theomancies. Optical spectroscopy was found in 1672 from Newton’s description of the way that sun splits into different colours when passed through a prism and since then the term ‘spectrum’ came into consideration.
In 1802, William Hyde Wollaston analysed sunlight, which led to the discovery of black lines in the spectrum, but it had been left uncharacterized. Fraunhofer, beginning in 1817, started to map and examine the dark lines, designating a few of the more prominent ones with letters beginning with in the red end of the spectrum. These black lines were later clarified because of the absorption of light in the sun’s atmosphere by Sir David Brewster in 1820. Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff analysed the sodium spectrum and concluded that each and every element has a particular spectrum which may be used to identify components in their gaseous phase. Kirchhoff further explained the phenomenon that if a substance emits electromagnetic radiation of a specific wavelength, it may also absorb radiation of the wavelength. Despite these early discoveries, atomic absorption spectroscopy was largely limited. To Astrophysical research and has been virtually ignored until 1950, likely because of the high degree of difficulty of this technique and there was a need for a very large resolution to make quantitative measurements.
In 1952 Alan Walsh, a physicist working in the Chemical Physics Section of the CSIRO Division of Industrial Chemistry at Melbourne, Australia, overcame the lingering problem. This was done by means of a unique sort of nuclear spectral lamp usually a hollow-cathode lamp, which emitted a pulsed signal of very narrow spectral lines characteristic of the component being determined, at least one of that may be absorbed by the atoms of the element in the flame. It was likely because of his expertise in two complementary Areas of spectroscopy, i.e., in emission spectrochemical analysis and in infrared absorption, that led him to invent the double-pass monochromator. In 1953, CSIRO filed a patent application and in March 1954, a tool to demonstrate the atomic absorption procedure was shown in an exhibition in Melbourne. In 1955 Walsh released his classic study paper on the Fundamentals of AAS and its potential for chemical analysis. In the same year, two Dutch physicists, Alkemade and Milat, independently published similar findings about the absorption flame photometer.