Soap-Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould ThemBoys, C. V. (Charles Vernon)
Science
Soap-Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them
Boys, C. V. (Charles Vernon)
Bubbles; Capillarity; Surface tension
At the conclusion of the last lecture I showed you some curious
experiments with a fountain of water, which I have now to explain.
Consider what I have said about a liquid cylinder. If it is a little
more than three times as long as it is wide, it cannot retain its form;
if it is made very much more than three times as long, it will break up
into a series of beads. Now, if in any way a series of necks could be
developed upon a cylinder which were less than three diameters apart,
some of them would tend to heal up, because a piece of a cylinder less
than three diameters long is stable. If they were about three diameters
apart, the form being then unstable, the necks would get more pronounced
in time, and would at last break through, so that beads would be formed.
If necks were made at distances more than three diameters apart, then
the cylinder would go on breaking up by the narrowing of these necks,
and it would most easily break up into drops when the necks were just
four and a half diameters apart. In other words, if a fountain were to
issue from a nozzle held perfectly still, the water would most easily
break into beads at the distance of four and a half diameters apart, but
it would break up into a greater number closer together, or a smaller
number further apart, if by slight disturbances of the jet very slight
waists were impressed upon the issuing cylinder of water. When you make
a fountain play from a jet which you hold as still as possible, there
are still accidental tremors of all kinds, which impress upon the
issuing cylinder slightly narrow and wide places at irregular distances,
and so the cylinder breaks up irregularly into drops of different sizes
and at different distances apart. Now these drops, as they are in the
act of separating from one another, and are drawing out the waist, as
you have seen, are being pulled for the moment towards one another by
the elasticity of the skin of the waist; and, as they are free in the
air to move as they will, this will cause the hinder one to hurry on,
and the more forward one to lag behind, so that unless they are all
exactly alike both in size and distance apart they will many of them
bounce together before long. You would expect when they hit one another
afterwards that they would join, but I shall be able to show you in a
moment that they do not; they act like two india-rubber balls, and
bounce away again. Now it is not difficult to see that if you have a
series of drops of different sizes and at irregular distances bouncing
against one another frequently, they will tend to separate and to fall,
as we have seen, on all parts of the paper down below. What did the
sealing-wax or the smoky flame do? and what can the musical sound do to
stop this from happening? Let me first take the sealing-wax. A piece of
sealing-wax rubbed on your coat is electrified, and will attract light
bits of paper up to it. The sealing-wax acts electrically on the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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