Sinossi
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1832 Excerpt: ...on pure water. They employed for this purpose an apparatus consisting of a glass tube, twelve inches long and oneeighth of an inch in diameter, through one end of which a gold wire was in serted, projecting about an inch and a half within the tube; that end was then hermetically sealed. Another wire was introduced at the other end of the tube, which was left open, and passed upwards, so that its extremity came to a distance of five-eighths of an inch from the end of the first wire. The tube was then filled with distilled water, which bad been freed from air by an excellent air-pump, and inverted in a vessel containing mercury. A little common air was let into the top of the tube, in order to prevent its being broken by the discharge. Electrical shocks were then passed between the two ends of the wires through the water in the tube by means of a Leyden jar, which had a square foot of coated surface. This jar was charged by a very powerful double plate machine, which caused it to discharge twenty-five times in fifteen revolutions. At each explosion bubbles of air were formed, and rose to the top of the tube. As soon as a sufficient quantity had collected to leave the upper end of the wire uncovered by the water, so that the shock had now to pass through a portion of the mixed gases, they were instantly kindled; a reunion of the elements took place; water was again formed, and the space they had occupied was immediately filled with fluid from below, so as to restore every thing precisely as at the outset of the experiment. It was ascertained by the most decisive chemical tests, that the gases thus obtained consisted of a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen gases. (176.) It may appear somewhat paradoxical that the same agent should, in the course of the same experim...
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