Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews. V. 1-2Tyndall, John
Science
Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews. V. 1-2
Tyndall, John
Chemistry; Physics; Science
Eminent experimenters were long occupied in demonstrating the
substantial identity of light and radiant heat, and we have now the
means of offering a new and striking proof of this identity. A
concave mirror produces, beyond the object which it reflects, an
inverted and magnified image of the object. Withdrawing, for example,
our iodine solution, an intensely luminous inverted image of the
carbon points of the electric light is formed at the focus of the
mirror employed in the foregoing experiments. When the solution is
interposed, and the light is cut away, what becomes of this image? It
disappears from sight; but an invisible thermograph remains, and it is
only the peculiar constitution of our eyes that disqualifies us from
seeing the picture formed by the calorific rays. Falling on white
paper, the image chars itself out: falling on black paper, two holes
are pierced in it, corresponding to the images of the two coke points:
but falling on a thin plate of carbon in vacuo, or upon a thin sheet
of platinised platinum, either in vacuo or in air, radiant heat is
converted into light, and the image stamps itself in vivid
incandescence upon both the carbon and the metal. Results similar to
those obtained with the electric light have also been obtained with
the invisible rays of the lime-light and of the sun.
Before a Cambridge audience it is hardly necessary to refer to the
excellent researches of Professor Stokes at the opposite end of the
spectrum. The above results constitute a kind of complement to his
discoveries. Professor Stokes named the phenomena which he has
discovered and investigated _Fluorescence_; for the new phenomena here
described I have proposed the term _Calorescence_. He, by the
interposition of a proper medium, so lowered the refrangibility of the
ultraviolet rays of the spectrum as to render them visible. Here, by
the interposition of the platinum foil, the refrangibility of the
ultra-red rays is so exalted as to render them visible. Looking
through a prism at the incandescent image of the carbon points, the
light of the image is decomposed, and a complete spectrum is obtained.
The invisible rays of the electric light, remoulded by the atoms of
the platinum, shine thus visibly forth; ultra-red rays being converted
into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and ultraviolet
ones. Could we, moreover, raise the original source of rays to a
sufficiently high temperature, we might not only obtain from the dark
rays of such a source a single incandescent image, but from the dark
rays of this image we might obtain a second one, from the dark rays of
the second a third, and so on--a series of complete images and spectra
being thus extracted from the invisible emission of the primitive
source. [Footnote: On investigating the calorescence produced by rays
transmitted through glasses of various colours, it was found that in
the case of certain specimens of blue glass, the platinum foil glowed
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