Inventors at Work, with Chapters on DiscoveryIles, George
History
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
Iles, George
Inventions -- History; Inventors
Dr. Wollaston, in 1802, as we have seen stood upon the threshold of
spectroscopy without knowing it. During the same year he performed an
experiment which took him into the field of photography without his
recognizing the possibilities of that wonderful art. He took paper
which had been dipped in muriate of silver and caught on its surface
impressions of the ultra-violet light in a solar spectrum. These rays,
as rings, were reflected from a thin plate of air, as in the case of the
colors of thin plates, at distances corresponding to their proper places
in the spectrum. Thus was established the close analogy between rays
visible and invisible, and by a method destined to give mankind a
universal limner in light of all kinds, and in much radiance which is
not luminous at all.
Two Observers of the Skies.
Edward Emerson Barnard, of the Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay,
Wisconsin, is in the first rank of living astronomers. Among his many
discoveries the most remarkable is that of the fifth satellite of
Jupiter at the Lick Observatory. His early work at the Vanderbilt
Observatory, Nashville, gave full promise of his later achievements. One
evening in November, 1883, he was observing an occultation of the
well-known star _Beta Capricorni_ by the moon. He had patiently waited
for his opportunity; such an occultation is best seen when the moon is a
small crescent, the star disappearing at the dark curve of the moon
where its beams do not overpower the feeble stellar ray. When the moon
passes between the eye and a fixed star, the disappearance of the star
is instantaneous. At the distance from which we look at it the star is a
point only, and as the moon has no atmosphere, the instant the edge of
the lunar surface touches the line joining the eye of the observer with
the star, it vanishes from sight. When the moon passed in front of _Beta
Capricorni_ Mr. Barnard noticed that instead of disappearing at once,
there was a sudden partial diminution of the light of the star, then a
total extinction of the remaining point. The interval between the
diminution and complete extinction of the light occupied only a few
tenths of a second, but it was long enough to put his keen mind upon
inquiry. Mr. Barnard in an astronomical journal called attention to the
phenomenon and suggested that instead of there being only one star, as
formerly supposed, there were really two stars so close together that in
an ordinary six-inch telescope, such as he had used, they appeared to be
one. He inferred also that one of the pair must be a good deal brighter
than the other, because at the beginning the change in brightness was
less than at the end. This surmise was soon afterward fully verified by
Mr. S. W. Burnham with the eighteen and one half inch equatorial of the
Dearborn Observatory at Chicago, revealing a close and unequal double
star which would have remained unresolved had he used a less powerful
instrument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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