Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/859

Rh were of the nature of electrical currents, they ought, being of the same sign, to attract each other. This experiment seems to point to an electrostatic nature of the cathode rays. The electrostatic lines of force go out from a charged conductor at right angles to the surface of the conductor. I have had constructed a Crookes tube with two parallel terminals of aluminum. The fluorescence in the walls of the vessel, when it was exhausted, showed that the cathode rays went out from every element of the cathode at right angles to it. By bending it into an arc of a circle the cathode beams traveled over the surface of the vessel, forming zones of light the centers of which were in the bent wire. Is it not possible that by the electrostatic action the few molecules of air left in the high vacua are shot off with great velocity and bombard the walls of the vessel, thus giving rise to the fluorescent light, and also giving rise to an agitation of the molecules of matter outside the vessel? This may be called the molecular view of the phenomenon. I confess it is difficult to see why the molecular agitation is stopped by a thin sheet of glass and not by an inch of wood. It is certain that a few molecules must be left in the high vacua, for the cathode rays can not be formed in a perfect vacuum.

It is also true that it is useless to attempt to obtain photographs in any reasonable time from tubes which do not show a strongly marked cathode beam, or from tubes which on reversing the electric current through them do not show a marked difference between the light at the cathode and that at the anode. In poorly exhausted tubes one can perceive a faint appearance of a cathode beam, which is lost at a short distance from the cathode, as if the molecules which are shot off meet with such a crowd of more slowly moving ones that their energy is soon lost, and the cathode beam is quickly diffused like a beam of sunlight passing into milk and water. Thus the beam of cathode or X rays emerging from the glass vessel into the air is soon no longer conical in form. The sides of the cone of rays are no longer straight; they are curved, as if the generatrix of the cone were a curved line instead of a straight line, and the beam is soon lost in a turbid medium. One can imagine a stream of projectiles being similarly dispersed in striving to pass into a region of sluggishly moving shot. This molecular view of the phenomenon seems at first sight to be a more tangible one than the longitudinal wave theory. It is possible, too, that the impact of the molecules on the aluminum window of Lenard, or on the glass sides of the vessel, may serve to start ripples, so to speak, in the ether, which are propagated with the velocity of light.

The Röntgen phenomenon seems to be a manifestation of cathode rays brought to light and endowed with great practical