Page:On Electric Touch and the Molecular Changes produced in Matter by Electric Waves.djvu/21

472 in both the classes of fatigued substance), but by removing the strain in B and thus converting it into A.

The effect of electric radiation is thus to produce rearrangement of atoms and molecules in a substance; so does light produce new atomic and molecular aggregation in a photographic plate—a subject to be dealt with in detail in a future paper. Some of my audience at the Royal Institution (January, 1897) may remember my attempt at explaining the action of the so-called coherers (which, perhaps, may be better described as "molecular receivers") by analogy with the photographic action. I had then no proofs for the assertion. I have since been able to obtain experimental evidence that the two phenomena are

identical. The coherer may therefore be regarded as a linear photographic plate; since we are more likely to understand the complex photographic action from the consideration of the much simpler action of electric radiation on elementary substances, where the effects are not complicated by secondary reactions, a photographic plate may be regarded as merely an assemblage of "molecular receivers." I hope also to prove that nearly all the detectors of radiation are molecular receivers in reality. The investigation of this aspect of the subject has given me some extraordinary results; they seem to connect together many phenomena which at first sight do not seem to have anything in common. Another interesting question, the consideration of which has for the present to be postponed, is, Why is it that the sensitiveness is so marked in discontinuous metallic particles? In other words, Why is the phenomenon mainly one of skin or touch? Is the phenomenon wholly unknown in continuous solids?

The experiments described in the present paper show:—