Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/334

320 effects. The employment of suspending springs has rendered the double service of suppressing injurious vibrations and of collecting into a useful form all the work which they represent.

Is this all? Do there not remain, even with the best carriages, other vibrations and other shocks which must be pursued and destroyed in order to render more perfect the conditions of traction? You have all experienced, at the moment of the sudden start of a carriage, and even at each stroke of the whip on a living horse, horizontal shocks which sometimes throw you to the bottom of the carriage. In a less degree, shocks of the same kind are produced at each instant of traction, for the speed of the horse is far from being uniform, and the traces are subjected to alternate tension and slackness. Here are veritable shocks which use up part of the work of the horse in giving only hurtful effects which bruise and contuse the breast of the animal, injuring his muscles, and, in spite of the padding of the collar, sometimes wounding him. To prove the disadvantages of this kind of shocks, some experiments are necessary. I have borrowed one from Poncelet; it is easily made, and any one may repeat it. I attach a weight of five kilos to the extremity of a small string; taking hold of the free extremity of this, if I gently raise the weight, you see that the cord resists the weight of five kilos and holds it suspended. But if I attempt to raise the same weight more rapidly, I bruise my fingers, the cord breaks, and the weight has not budged. The effort which I have made has been greater than the preceding, since it has exceeded the resistance of the cord; but the duration of this effort has been too short, and, the inertia of the weight not being overcome, all my exertion has been expended in injurious work. If, instead of an inextensible cord, I had attached to the weight a cord a little extensible, the sudden effort of elevation which I made would have been transformed into an action more prolonged, and the weight would have been raised without breaking the cord and bruising my fingers. To render the phenomenon more easy of comprehension, I shall make a new experiment under conditions a little different.

You see on a vertical support (Fig. 1) a sort of balance-beam, which bears on one of its arms a weight of one hundred grammes, on the other a weight of ten grammes suspended at the end of a cord one metre long. Between these two unequal weights the beam is maintained by a spring-catch, which prevents it from falling to the side of the heavier weight, but which, on the other hand, permits the beam to incline in the opposite direction, if we bring to bear on the end of the cord an effort greater than the weight of one hundred grammes. But, by letting the smaller weight fall from a sufficient height, at the moment when this reaches the end of its course, it will stretch the cord which holds it, and will develop what is called a vis viva, capable of raising the weight of one hundred grammes to a certain height; but this elevation will only take place on condition that the