A History of Science, vol 3 by Henry Smith Williams (sites to read books for free TXT) 📕

The next ambitious attempt to explain the phenomena of aqueous meteors was made by Luke Howard, in his remarkable paper on clouds, published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1803—the paper in which the names cirrus, cumulus, stratus, etc., afterwards so universally adopted, were first proposed. In this paper Howard acknowledges his indebtedness to Dalton for the theory of evaporation; yet he still clings to the idea that the vapor, though independent of the air, is combined with particles of caloric. He holds that clouds are composed of vapor that has previously risen from the earth, combating the opinions of those who believe that they are formed by the union of hydrogen and oxygen existing independently in the air; though he agrees with these theorists that electricity has entered largely into the modus operandi of cloud formation. He opposes the opinion of Deluc and De Saussure that clouds are composed of particles of water in the form of hollow vesicles (miniature balloons, in short, perhaps filled with hydrogen), which untenable opinion was a revival of the theory as to the formation of all vapor which Dr. Halley had advocated early in the eighteenth century.

Of particular interest are Howard’s views as to the formation of dew, which he explains as caused by the particles of caloric forsaking the vapor to enter the cool body, leaving the water on the surface. This comes as near the truth, perhaps, as could be expected while the old idea as to the materiality of heat held sway. Howard believed, however, that dew is usually formed in the air at some height, and that it settles to the surface, opposing the opinion, which had gained vogue in France and in America (where Noah Webster prominently advocated it), that dew ascends from the earth.

The complete solution of the problem of dew formation—

which really involved also the entire question of precipitation of watery vapor in any form—was made by Dr. W. C. Wells, a man of American birth, whose life, however, after boyhood, was spent in Scotland (where as a young man he enjoyed the friendship of David Hume) and in London. Inspired, no doubt, by the researches of Mack, Hutton, and their confreres of that Edinburgh school, Wells made observations on evaporation and precipitation as early as 1784, but other things claimed his attention; and though he asserts that the subject was often in his mind, he did not take it up again in earnest until about 1812.

Meantime the observations on heat of Rumford and Davy and Leslie had cleared the way for a proper interpretation of the facts—about the facts themselves there had long been practical unanimity of opinion.

Dr. Black, with his latent-heat observations, had really given the clew to all subsequent discussions of the subject of precipitation of vapor; and from this time on it had been known that heat is taken up when water evaporates, and given out again when it condenses.

Dr. Darwin had shown in 1788, in a paper before the Royal Society, that air gives off heat on contracting and takes it up on expanding; and Dalton, in his essay of 1793, had explained this phenomenon as due to the condensation and vaporization of the water contained in the air.

But some curious and puzzling observations which Professor Patrick Wilson, professor of astronomy in the University of Glasgow, had communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784, and some similar ones made by Mr. Six, of Canterbury, a few years later, had remained unexplained. Both these gentlemen observed that the air is cooler where dew is forming than the air a few feet higher, and they inferred that the dew in forming had taken up heat, in apparent violation of established physical principles.

It remained for Wells, in his memorable paper of 1816, to show that these observers had simply placed the cart before the horse. He made it clear that the air is not cooler because the dew is formed, but that the dew is formed because the air is cooler—having become so through radiation of heat from the solids on which the dew forms. The dew itself, in forming, gives out its latent heat, and so tends to equalize the temperature.

Wells’s paper is so admirable an illustration of the lucid presentation of clearly conceived experiments and logical conclusions that we should do it injustice not to present it entire. The author’s mention of the observations of Six and Wilson gives added value to his own presentation.

Dr. Wells’s Essay on Dew

“I was led in the autumn of 1784, by the event of a rude experiment, to think it probable that the formation of dew is attended with the production of cold.

In 1788, a paper on hoar-frost, by Mr. Patrick Wilson, of Glasgow, was published in the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, by which it appeared that this opinion bad been entertained by that gentleman before it had occurred to myself. In the course of the same year, Mr. Six, of Canterbury, mentioned in a paper communicated to the Royal Society that on clear and dewy nights he always found the mercury lower in a thermometer laid upon the ground in a meadow in his neighborhood than it was in a similar thermometer suspended in the air six feet above the former; and that upon one night the difference amounted to five degrees of Fahrenheit’s scale. Mr. Six, however, did not suppose, agreeably to the opinion of Mr. Wilson and myself, that the cold was occasioned by the formation of dew, but imagined that it proceeded partly from the low temperature of the air, through which the dew, already formed in the atmosphere, had descended, and partly from the evaporation of moisture from the ground, on which his thermometer had been placed. The conjecture of Mr.

Wilson and the observations of Mr. Six, together with many facts which I afterwards learned in the course of reading, strengthened my opinion; but I made no attempt, before the autumn of 1811, to ascertain by experiment if it were just, though it had in the mean time almost daily occurred to my thoughts. Happening, in that season, to be in that country in a clear and calm night, I laid a thermometer upon grass wet with dew, and suspended a second in the air, two feet above the other. An hour afterwards the thermometer on the grass was found to be eight degrees lower, by Fahrenheit’s division, than the one in the air. Similar results having been obtained from several similar experiments, made during the same autumn, I determined in the next spring to prosecute the subject with some degree of steadiness, and with that view went frequently to the house of one of my friends who lives in Surrey.

At the end of two months I fancied that I had collected information worthy of being published; but, fortunately, while preparing an account of it I met by accident with a small posthumous work by Mr. Six, printed at Canterbury in 1794, in which are related differences observed on dewy nights between thermometers placed upon grass and others in the air that are much greater than those mentioned in the paper presented by him to the Royal Society in 1788. In this work, too, the cold of the grass is attributed, in agreement with the opinion of Mr. Wilson, altogether to the dew deposited upon it. The value of my own observations appearing to me now much diminished, though they embraced many points left untouched by Mr. Six, I gave up my intentions of making them known. Shortly after, however, upon considering the subject more closely, I began to suspect that Mr. Wilson, Mr. Six, and myself had all committed an error regarding the cold which accompanies dew as an effect of the formation of that fluid. I therefore resumed my experiments, and having by means of them, I think, not only established the justness of my suspicions, but ascertained the real cause both of dew and of several other natural appearances which have hitherto received no sufficient explanation, I venture now to submit to the consideration of the learned an account of some of my labors, without regard to the order of time in which they were performed, and of various conclusions which may be drawn from them, mixed with facts and opinions already published by others: “There are various occurrences in nature which seem to me strictly allied to dew, though their relation to it be not always at first sight perceivable. The statement and explanation of several of these will form the concluding part of the present essay.

“1. I observed one morning, in winter, that the insides of the panes of glass in the windows of my bedchamber were all of them moist, but that those which had been covered by an inside shutter during the night were much more so than the others which had been uncovered. Supposing that this diversity of appearance depended upon a difference of temperature, I applied the naked bulbs of two delicate thermometers to a covered and uncovered pane; on which I found that the former was three degrees colder than the latter. The air of the chamber, though no fire was kept in it, was at this time eleven and one-half degrees warmer than that without. Similar experiments were made on many other mornings, the results of which were that the warmth of the internal air exceeded that of the external from eight to eighteen degrees, the temperature of the covered panes would be from one to five degrees less than the uncovered; that the covered were sometimes dewed, while the uncovered were dry; that at other times both were free from moisture; that the outsides of the covered and uncovered panes had similar differences with respect to heat, though not so great as those of the inner surfaces; and that no variation in the quantity of these differences was occasioned by the weather’s being cloudy or fair, provided the heat of the internal air exceeded that of the external equally in both of those states of the atmosphere.

“The remote reason of these differences did not immediately present itself. I soon, however, saw that the closed shutter shielded the glass which it covered from the heat that was radiated to the windows by the walls and furniture of the room, and thus kept it nearer to the temperature of the external air than those parts could be which, from being uncovered, received the heat emitted to them by the bodies just mentioned.

“In making these experiments, I seldom observed the inside of any pane to be more than a little damped, though it might be from eight to twelve degrees colder than the general mass of the air in the room; while, in the open air, I had often found a great dew to form on substances only three or four degrees colder than the atmosphere. This at first surprised me; but the cause now seems plain. The air of the chamber had once been a portion of the external atmosphere, and had afterwards been heated, when it could receive little accessories to its original moisture. It constantly required being cooled considerably before it was even brought back to its former nearness to repletion with water; whereas the whole external air is commonly, at night, nearly replete with moisture, and therefore readily precipitates dew on bodies only a little colder than itself.

“When the air of a room is warmer than the external atmosphere, the effect of an outside shutter on the temperature of the glass of the window will be directly opposite to what has just been stated;