“Look here, I have succeeded at last in fetching some gold from the sun.”

—  Gustav Kirchhoff

after his banker questioned the value of investigating gold in the Fraunhofer lines of the sun and Kirchhoff handing him over a medal he was awarded for his investigations.
A memoir of Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, by Robert Von Helmholtz, translated by Joseph De Perott, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution (1890), p. 537.

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German physicist 1824–1887

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