PROFESSOR RUTHERFORD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 47, 13 July 1912, Page 4

PROFESSOR RUTHERFORD

EXPERIMENTS WITH LIQUID AIR. The Eltham Argus has been permitted to make the following extracts from a letter sent to a local resident by Mr. H. G. Sergei, lately residing in that district: — I thought perhaps you might like to have an account of a visit I paid to Professor Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester University. This laboratory is one of the most active in the world with regard to radium research, and it is therefore interesting that it should be in the charge of a New Zealander. Perhaps t'he most, in a sense, entertaining part of our examination of the many rooms in the large physics building, was when we were shown liquid air. I am told liquid air is made by cooling air down to an almost (to a lay mind) inconceivable coldness, namely, :)so(leg, below zero, Fahrenheit, or roughly five times colder than at the North Pole. I am afraid I cannot describe the apparatus for so cooling air, but the process* is done by expanding air from a high pressure. They keep it in a doublewall ed glass flask, with vacuum in between, in order to prevent heat getting to it. It pours out just like water, and it freezes any liquid, even mercury and whisky. If you get any burnable substance into it, like an ordinarv biscuit, and apply a match, it burns like a torch or a squib. Such a pretty, fizzy flame. If you dip a piece of rubber into it, it becomes like stone.

One of the professors performed such a pretty experiment for us. He look a flat, square brass plate, supported bv the centre on « stand, and then put some very fine powder on it. Then, taking n. big fiddle bow, bv drawing the bow on the edge of (be plate, just or one would draw the bow across fiddle string.*, it set up vibrations on the plate, resulting in the powder forming exact geometrical patterns. And. drawing the bow at different point* of the edge of the plate produced different geometrical designs bv the powder on the plate. Tliei-e are evidently certain definite rules with ream rd to vibrations. Tt reallv was more like a conjuring trick. The designs formed were so varied, but all so exact.