Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century

Many of the modern discoveries and inventions already described in these pages have been instances of practical applications of science to the every-day wants of mankind; but the chief interest of the subject we now enter upon flows mainly from other sources than direct applications of its principles in useful arts, although these applications are already neither few nor unimportant. But that which, in the highest degree, claims our attention and excites our admiration in the revelations of the spectroscope is the wonderful and wholly unexpected extent to which this instrument has enlarged our knowledge of the universe, and the apparently inadequate means by which this has been accomplished. A little triangular piece of glass gives us power to rob the stars of their secrets, and tells more about those distant orbs than the wildest imagination could have deemed attainable to human knowledge. One of the most acute philosophers of the present century, a profound thinker who devoted his mind to the consideration of the mutual relations of the sciences, declared emphatically, not very many years ago, that all we could know of the heavenly bodies must ever be confined to an acquaintance with their motions, and to such a limited acquaintance with their features as the telescope reveals in the less distant ones. 417A knowledge of their composition, he expressly asserted, could never be attained, for we could have no means of chemically examining the matter of which they are constituted. Such was the deliberate utterance of a man by no means disposed to underrate the power of the human mind in the pursuit of truth. And such might still have been the opinion of the learned and of the unlearned, but for the remarkable train of discoveries which has led us to the construction of instruments revealing to us the nature of the substances entering into the constitution of the heavenly bodies. We have now, for example, the same certainty about the existence of iron in our sun, that we have about its existence in the poker and tongs on the hearth. The last few years have seen the dawn of a new science; and two branches of knowledge which formerly seemed far as the poles asunder—namely, astronomy and chemistry—have their interests united in this new science of celestial chemistry. The progress which has been made in this department of spectroscopic research is so rapid, and the field is so promising, that the well-instructed juvenile of the future, instead of idly repeating the simple lay of our childhood: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!” will probably only have to direct his sidereal spectroscope to the object of his admiration in order to obtain exact information as to what the star is, chemically and physically. Fig. 216. The results which have already been obtained in celestial chemistry, and other branches of spectroscopic science, are so surprising, and apparently so remote from the range of ordinary experience, that the reader can only appreciate these wonderful discoveries by tracing the steps by which they have been reached. A few fundamental phenomena of light have already been spoken of in the foregoing article; and an acquaintance with these will have prepared the reader’s mind for a consideration of the new facts we are about to describe. In discussing, in the foregoing pages, the subject of refraction, we have, in order that the reader’s attention might not be distracted, omitted all mention of a circumstance attending it, when a beam of ordinary light falls upon a refracting surface, such as that represented in Fig. 203. The laws there explained apply, in fact, to elementary rays, and not to ordinary white light, which is a mixture of a vast multitude of elementary rays, red, yellow, green, &c. When such a beam falls obliquely upon a piece of glass, the ray is, at its entrance, broken up into its elements, for these, being refracted in different degrees by the glass, each pursues a different path in that medium, as represented by Fig. 216. Each elementary ray obeys the laws which have been explained, and therefore each emerges from the second surface of the plate parallel to the incident ray, and, in 418consequence of this, the separation is not perceptible under ordinary circumstances with plates of glass having parallel surfaces. But, if the second surface be inclined so as to form such an angle with the first that the rays are rendered still more divergent in their exit, then the separation of the light into its elementary coloured rays becomes quite obvious. Such is the arrangement of the surfaces in a prism, and in the triangular pieces of glass which are used in lustres. For the fundamental experimental fact of our subject, we must go back two centuries, when we shall find Sir Isaac Newton making his celebrated analysis of light by means of the glass prism. We shall describe Newton’s experiment, for, although it was performed so long ago, and is generally well known, it will render our view of the present subject more complete; and it will also serve to impress on the reader an additional instance of the world’s indebtedness to that great mind, when we thus trace the grand results of modern discovery from their source. “It is well,” is the remark of a clear thinker and eloquent writer, “to turn aside from the fretful din of the present, and to dwell with gratitude and respect upon the services of ‘those mighty men of old, who have gone down to the grave with their weapons of war,’ but who, while they lived, won splendid victories over ignorance.” Fig. 217.—Newton’s Experiment. The experiment of Sir Isaac Newton will be readily understood from Fig. 217, where C is the prism, and A C represents the path of a beam of sunlight allowed to enter into a dark apartment through a small round hole in a shutter, all other light being excluded from the apartment. In this position of the prism, the rays into which the sunbeam is broken at its entrance into the glass were bent upwards, and at their emergence from the glass they were again bent upwards, still more separated, so that when a white screen was placed in their path, instead of a white circular image of the sun appearing, as would have been the case had the light been merely refracted and not split up, Newton saw on the screen the variously-coloured band, D D, which he termed the spectrum. The letters in the figure indicate the relative positions of the various colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, &c., by their initial letters. The spectrum, or prolonged 419coloured image of the sun, is red at the end, R, where the rays are least refracted, and violet at the other extremity, where the refraction is greatest, while, in the intermediate spaces, yellow, green, and blue pass by insensible gradations into each other. Newton varied his experiment in many ways, as, for example, by trying the effect of refraction through a second prism on the differently coloured rays. He found that the second prism did not divide the yellow rays, for instance, into any other colour, but merely bent them out of the straight course, to form on the second screen a somewhat broader band of yellow, and similarly with regard to the others. From these, and a number of other experiments described in his “Opticks,” (A. D. 1675), Newton concludes, “that if the sun’s light consisted of but one sort of rays, there would be but one colour in the whole world, nor would it be possible to produce any new colour by reflections and refractions, and, by consequence, the variety of colours depends upon the composition of light.” ... “And if, at any time, I speak of light and rays, or coloured, or endued with colours, I would be understood to speak not philosophically and properly, but grossly, and accordingly to such conceptions as vulgar people in seeing all these experiments would be apt to frame. For the rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour. For, as sound in a bell, a musical string, or other sounding body, is nothing but a trembling motion, and in the air nothing but that motion propagated from the object, and in the sensorium ‘tis a sense of that motion under the form of a sound; so colours in the object are nothing but a disposition to reflect this or that sort of rays more copiously than the rest: in the rays they are nothing but their dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the sensorium, and in the sensorium they are sensations of these motions under the form of colours.” These memorable investigations of Newton’s have been the admiration of succeeding philosophers, and even poets have caught inspiration from this theme: “Nor could the darting beam of speed immense Escape his swift pursuit and measuring eye. E’en Light itself, which everything displays. Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And, from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every ray into his kind, To the charmed eye educed the gorgeous train Of parent colours. First the flaming red Sprung vivid forth; the tawny orange next; And next delicious yellow—by whose side Fell the kind beams of all-refreshing green; Then the pure blue, that swells autumnal skies, Ethereal played; and then, of sadder hue Emerged the deepened indigo, as when The heavy-skirted evening droops with frost, While the last gleamings of refracted light Died in the fainting violet away. These, when the clouds distil the rosy show, Shine out distinct adown the watery bow; While o’er our heads the dewy vision bends Delightful—melting on the fields beneath. Myriads of mingling dyes from these result, And myriads still remain.—Infinite source Of beauty! ever blushing—ever new! Did ever poet image aught so fair, Dreaming in whispering groves, by the hoarse brook, Or prophet, to whose rapture Heaven descends?” The spectra which Newton obtained by admitting the solar beams 420through a circular aperture, were, however, not simple spectra. The circular beam may be considered as built up of flat and very thin bands of light, parallel to the edges of the prism, and a simple ray would be formed by one of these flat bands; as the round opening would allow an indefinite number of such rays to enter, each would produce its own spectrum on the screen, and the actual image would be formed of a number of spectra overlapping each other. When the aperture by which the light is admitted consists merely of a narrow slit, or line, parallel to the edges of the prism, we obtain what is termed a pure spectrum. When the prism is properly placed, an eye, viewing the fine slit through it, sees a spectrum formed, as it were, of a succession of virtual images of the slit in all the elementary coloured rays. The person who first examined the solar spectrum in this manner was the English chemist Wollaston, who, in 1802, found that the spectrum thus observed was not continuous, but that it was crossed at intervals by dark lines. Wollaston saw them by placing his eye directly behind the prism. Twelve years later, namely, in 1814, the German optician Fraunhofer devised a much better mode of viewing the spectrum; for, instead of looking through the prism with the naked eye, he used a telescope, placing the prism and the telescope at a distance of 24 ft. from the slit, the virtual image of which was thus considerably magnified. The prism was so placed that the incident and refracted rays formed nearly equal angles with its faces, in which circumstance the ray is least deflected from its direction, and the position is therefore spoken of as being that of minimum deviation. It can be shown that this position is the only one in which