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

The peculiar ray’s, now known as the cathode rays, not only cast a shadow, but are deflected by a magnet, so that the position of the phosphorescence on the sides of the tube may be altered by the proximity of a powerful magnet. From this it would seem that the rays are composed of particles charged with negative electricity, and Professor J. J. Thomson has modified the experiment of Perrin to show that negative electricity is actually associated with the rays. There is reason for believing, therefore, that the cathode rays are rapidly moving charges of negative electricity. It is possible, also, to determine the velocity at which these particles are moving by measuring the deflection produced by the magnetic field.

From the fact that opaque substances cast a shadow in these rays it was thought at first that all solids were absolutely opaque to them. Hertz, however, discovered that a small amount of phosphorescence occurred on the glass even when such opaque substances as gold-leaf or aluminium foil were interposed between the cathode and the sides of the tube. Shortly afterwards Lenard discovered that the cathode rays can be made to pass from the inside of a discharge tube to the outside air. For convenience these rays outside the tube have since been known as “Lenard rays.”

In the closing days of December, 1895, Professor Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, of Wurzburg, announced that he had made the discovery of the remarkable effect arising from the cathode rays to which reference was made above. He found that if a plate covered with a phosphorescent substance is placed near a discharge tube exhausted so highly that the cathode rays produced a green phosphorescence, this plate is made to glow in a peculiar manner. The rays producing this glow were not the cathode rays, although apparently arising from them, and are what have since been called the Roentgen rays, or X-rays.

Roentgen found that a shadow is thrown upon the screen by substances held between it and the exhausted tube, the character of the shadow depending upon the density of the substance. Thus metals are almost completely opaque to the rays; such substances as bone much less so, and ordinary flesh hardly so at all.

If a coin were held in the hand that had been interposed between the tube and the screen the picture formed showed the coin as a black shadow; and the bones of the hand, while casting a distinct shadow, showed distinctly lighter; while the soft tissues produced scarcely any shadow at all. The value of such a discovery was obvious from the first; and was still further enhanced by the discovery made shortly that, photographic plates are affected by the rays, thus making it possible to make permanent photographic records of pictures through what we know as opaque substances.

What adds materially to the practical value of Roentgen’s discovery is the fact that the apparatus for producing the X-rays is now so simple and relatively inexpensive that it is within the reach even of amateur scientists. It consists essentially of an induction coil attached either to cells or a street-current plug for generating the electricity, a focus tube, and a phosphorescence screen. These focus tubes are made in various shapes, but perhaps the most popular are in the form of a glass globe, not unlike an ordinary small-sized water-bottle, this tube being closed and exhausted, and having the two poles (anode and cathode) sealed into the glass walls, but protruding at either end for attachment to the conducting wires from the induction coil. This tube may be mounted on a stand at a height convenient for manipulation. The phosphorescence screen is usually a plate covered with some platino-cyanide and mounted in the end of a box of convenient size, the opposite end of which is so shaped that it fits the contour of the face, shutting out the light and allowing the eyes of the observer to focalize on the screen at the end. For making observations the operator has simply to turn on the current of electricity and apply the screen to his eyes, pointing it towards the glowing tube, when the shadow of any substance interposed between the tube and the screen will appear upon the phosphorescence plate.

The wonderful shadow pictures produced on the phosphorescence screen, or the photographic plate, would seem to come from some peculiar form of light, but the exact nature of these rays is still an open question.

Whether the Roentgen rays are really a form of light—that is, a form of “electromagnetic disturbance propagated through ether,” is not fully determined.

Numerous experiments have been undertaken to determine this, but as yet no proof has been found that the rays are a form of light, although there appears to be nothing in their properties inconsistent with their being so. For the moment most investigators are content to admit that the term X-ray virtually begs the question as to the intimate nature of the form of energy involved.

VIII. THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY

As we have seen, it was in 1831 that Faraday opened up the field of magneto-electricity. Reversing the experiments of his predecessors, who had found that electric currents may generate magnetism, he showed that magnets have power under certain circumstances to generate electricity; he proved, indeed, the interconvertibility of electricity and magnetism.

Then he showed that all bodies are more or less subject to the influence of magnetism, and that even light may be affected by magnetism as to its phenomena of polarization. He satisfied himself completely of the true identity of all the various forms of electricity, and of the convertibility of electricity and chemical action.

Thus he linked together light, chemical affinity, magnetism, and electricity. And, moreover, he knew full well that no one of these can be produced in indefinite supply from another. “Nowhere,” he says, “is there a pure creation or production of power without a corresponding exhaustion of something to supply it.”

When Faraday wrote those words in 1840 he was treading on the very heels of a greater generalization than any which he actually formulated; nay, he had it fairly within his reach. He saw a great truth without fully realizing its import; it was left for others, approaching the same truth along another path, to point out its full significance.

The great generalization which Faraday so narrowly missed is the truth which since then has become familiar as the doctrine of the conservation of energy—the law that in transforming energy from one condition to another we can never secure more than an equivalent quantity; that, in short, “to create or annihilate energy is as impossible as to create or annihilate matter; and that all the phenomena of the material universe consist in transformations of energy alone.” Some philosophers think this the greatest generalization ever conceived by the mind of man. Be that as it may, it is surely one of the great intellectual landmarks of the nineteenth century. It stands apart, so stupendous and so far-reaching in its implications that the generation which first saw the law developed could little appreciate it; only now, through the vista of half a century, do we begin to see it in its true proportions.

A vast generalization such as this is never a mushroom growth, nor does it usually spring full grown from the mind of any single man. Always a number of minds are very near a truth before any one mind fully grasps it. Pre-eminently true is this of the doctrine of the conservation of energy. Not Faraday alone, but half a dozen different men had an inkling of it before it gained full expression; indeed, every man who advocated the undulatory theory of light and heat was verging towards the goal. The doctrine of Young and Fresnel was as a highway leading surely on to the wide plain of conservation. The phenomena of electromagnetism furnished another such highway. But there was yet another road which led just as surely and even more readily to the same goal. This was the road furnished by the phenomena of heat, and the men who travelled it were destined to outstrip their fellow-workers; though, as we have seen, wayfarers on other roads were within hailing distance when the leaders passed the mark.

In order to do even approximate justice to the men who entered into the great achievement, we must recall that just at the close of the eighteenth century Count Rumford and Humphry Davy independently showed that labor may be transformed into heat; and correctly interpreted this fact as meaning the transformation of molar into molecular motion. We can hardly doubt that each of these men of genius realized—vaguely, at any rate—that there must be a close correspondence between the amount of the molar and the molecular motions; hence that each of them was in sight of the law of the mechanical equivalent of heat. But neither of them quite grasped or explicitly stated what each must vaguely have seen; and for just a quarter of a century no one else even came abreast their line of thought, let alone passing it.

But then, in 1824, a French philosopher, Sadi Carnot, caught step with the great Englishmen, and took a long leap ahead by explicitly stating his belief that a definite quantity of work could be transformed into a definite quantity of heat, no more, no less. Carnot did not, indeed, reach the clear view of his predecessors as to the nature of heat, for he still thought it a form of “imponderable” fluid; but he reasoned none the less clearly as to its mutual convertibility with mechanical work. But important as his conclusions seem now that we look back upon them with clearer vision, they made no impression whatever upon his contemporaries.

Carnot’s work in this line was an isolated phenomenon of historical interest, but it did not enter into the scheme of the completed narrative in any such way as did the work of Rumford and Davy.

The man who really took up the broken thread where Rumford and Davy had dropped it, and wove it into a completed texture, came upon the scene in 1840.

His home was in Manchester, England; his occupation that of a manufacturer. He was a friend and pupil of the great Dr. Dalton. His name was James Prescott Joule. When posterity has done its final juggling with the names of the nineteenth century, it is not unlikely that the name of this Manchester philosopher will be a household word, like the names of Aristotle, Copernicus, and Newton.

For Joule’s work it was, done in the fifth decade of the century, which demonstrated beyond all cavil that there is a precise and absolute equivalence between mechanical work and heat; that whatever the form of manifestation of molar motion, it can generate a definite and measurable amount of heat, and no more.

Joule found, for example, that at the sea-level in Manchester a pound weight falling through seven hundred and seventy-two feet could generate enough heat to raise the temperature of a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. There was nothing haphazard, nothing accidental, about this; it bore the stamp of unalterable law. And Joule himself saw, what others in time were made to see, that this truth is merely a particular case within a more general law. If heat cannot be in any sense created, but only made manifest as a transformation of another kind of motion, then must not the same thing be true of all those other forms of “force”—light, electricity, magnetism—which had been shown to be so closely associated, so mutually convertible, with heat? All analogy seemed to urge the truth of this inference; all experiment tended to confirm it. The law of