Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/687

Rh see the colors from red to violet, but the dark colors, so to speak, formed by waves longer than of an inch and shorter than of an inch make no recognizable impress upon our retina, unless, indeed, they constitute telepathic signals which apparently stir our consciousness and make us believe that friends are communicating from a distance. The electrical discharge has lifted, so to speak, a realm of short waves of energy out of the darkness and made them visible. Can the human brain be made conscious of other waves which fill space?

But we have not by any means exhausted the protean manifestations of the X rays. Besides the photographic, the phosphorescent, and fluorescent effects, there are still more singular properties of these rays. One of the most striking consists in their opening a path for a current of electricity. The electrical discharge, feeble in itself, not capable of lifting by means of a motor a pound weight a foot from the floor, is yet competent to open a path for a current which can set all the trolley cars of a great city in motion. To exhibit this mysterious effect we bring the ends of the electrical current which we wish to excite near each other, but not touching, in a glass tube with thin walls, from which the air has been exhausted. When the X rays fall on the gap between the wires the electrical current immediately jumps across the gap with a vivid light. We have here the mechanism of an electrical relay—the feeble energy of the electric discharge can call into play a giant energy. By what energy does it accomplish this? Is it by compelling molecules to put themselves in line, so that the electrical current can bridge the gap? Is it by breaking down this mysterious ether of space, as if we threw a stone at a turbid bull's eye in a prison chamber and let in a flood of sunlight? How the imagination is stirred by this process, what seems dead and lifeless can, by a physical agency, be stirred to endless activity! The rays are like the touch of Ithuriel's spear.

The electrical discharge can accomplish all this, but the story of its activity is not yet told. It can not be told, for each year adds information in regard to these activities, for there are thousands of investigators at work. Another far-reaching manifestation is this: the rays can separate the air or a gas into its constituent particles, much as a strong electrical current separates water into oxygen and hydrogen. They can communicate electrical charges to these particles—positive and negative charges. The charged air-particles, when forced through partitions of spun glass, does not give up their electricity as they do when they are charged by an electrical machine. This curious manifestation leads me to suspect that the electricity and magnetism of the earth may be