Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/668

648 This experiment only rudely typifies the action of the atmosphere, which is discriminating and selective in an amazing degree, and, as there are really an infinite number of shades of color in the spectrum, it would take forever to describe the action in detail. It is merely for brevity, then, that we now unite the more refrangible colors under the general word "blue," and the others under the corresponding terms "orange" or "red."

All that I have the honor to lay before you is less an announcement of absolute novelty than an appeal to your already acquired knowledge, and to your reason as superior to the delusions of sense. I have, then, no novel experiment to offer, but to ask you to look at some familiar ones in a new light.

We are most of us familiar, for instance, with that devised by Sir Isaac Newton to show that white light is compounded of blue, red, and other colors, where, by turning a colored wheel rapidly, all blend into a grayish white. Here you see the "seven colors" on the screen; but, though all are here, I have intentionally arranged them so that there is too much blue, and the combined result is a very bluish white which may roughly stand for that of the original sun-ray. I now alter the proportion of the colors so as to virtually take out the excess of blue, and the result is colorless or white light. White, then, is not necessarily made by combining the "seven colors," or any number of them, unless they are there in just proportion (which is in effect what Newton himself says); and white, then, may be made out of such a bluish light as we have described, not by putting anything to it, but by taking away the excess which is there already.

Here, again, are two sectors—one blue, one orange-yellow with the blue in excess, making a bluish disk where they are revolved. I take out the excess of blue, and now what remains is white.

Here is the spectrum itself on the screen, but a spectrum which has been artificially modified so that the blue end is relatively too strong. I recombine the colors (by Professor Rood's ingenious device of an elastic mirror), and they do not make a pure white, but one tinted with blue. I take out the original excess of blue, and what remains combines into a pure white. Please bear in mind that, when we "put in" blue here, we have to do so by straining out other light through some obscuring medium, which makes the spectrum darker; but that, in the case of the actual sunlight, introducing more blue introduces more light and makes the spectrum brighter.

The spectrum on the screen ought to be made still brighter in the blue than it is—far, far brighter—and then it might represent to us the original solar spectrum before it has suffered any absorption either in the sun's atmosphere or our own. The Fraunhofer lines do not appear in it, for these, when found in the solar spectrum, show that certain individual rays have been stopped, or selected for absorption by the intervening atmospheres; and, though even the few yards of