Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/31

 gas follows all the convolutions into which skillful glass-blowers can manage to twist the glass. The negative pole being at one end and the positive pole at the other, the luminous phenomena seem to depend more on the positive than on the negative at the ordinary exhaustion



hitherto used to get the best phenomena of vacuum-tubes. But at a very high exhaustion the phenomena noticed in ordinary vacuum tubes when the induction-spark passes through them—an appearance of cloudy luminosity and of stratifications—disappear entirely. No cloud or fog whatever is seen in the body of the tube, and with such a vacuum as I am working with in these experiments, the only light observed is that from the phosphorescent surface of the glass. I have here two bulbs (Fig. 7), alike in shape and position of poles, the only difference being that one is at an exhaustion equal to a few millimetres of mercury—such a moderate exhaustion as will give the ordinary luminous phenomena—while the other is exhausted to about the millionth of an atmosphere. I will first connect the moderately exhausted bulb (A) with the induction-coil, and retaining the pole at one side (a) always negative, I will put the positive wire successively to the other poles with which the bulb is furnished. You see that as I change the position of the positive pole, the line of violet light joining the two poles changes, the electric current always choosing the shortest path between the two poles, and moving about the bulb as I alter the position of the wires.

This, then, is the kind of phenomenon we get in ordinary