Inventors at Work, with Chapters on DiscoveryIles, George
History
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
Iles, George
Inventions -- History; Inventors
So much for things to be observed in a country ramble, in a city store,
or at the docks of a busy port. Apart from all such things is a world
unseen, standing beneath the visible world, and equally worthy of study.
Here knowledge is based upon inferences, upon what lawyers call
circumstantial evidence. The chemist by means purely indirect studies
the molecule and the atom, objects that far elude his microscope. A
molecule is a part of a compound so small that it cannot be divided
without becoming something simpler. Thus a sugar molecule is made up of
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms; were these disjoined, the sugar, as
such, would cease to be, just as a brick wall no longer exists when its
bricks and their several slices of mortar are parted from one another as
separate units. Small as molecules are they have not escaped the
measuring rod of the physicist. Some years ago Lord Kelvin
experimentally arrived at the estimate that the average molecule has a
diameter of 1/760,000,000 inch. Such molecules when compared with masses
of like form, and of a diameter of one inch; have 760,000,000 times as
much surface. In the transmission of motion, with adhesion in play,
surfaces count for much, as when a wheel in motion is brought into
contact with a wheel at rest. Here may be an explanation of why
electricity is conducted through a wire with a velocity far exceeding
any speed we can mechanically impress upon the metal, because the
molecules concerned have incomparably more surface than the wire as a
mass.
Reservoirs of Energy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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