Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/343

Rh that to escape from these attractions and get free a corpuscle would have to possess a definite amount of energy, if a corpuscle had less energy than this then, even though projected away from the metal, it would fall back into it after traveling a short distance. When the metal is at a high temperature, as in the case of the incandescent wire, or when it is illuminated by ultra-violet light some of the corpuscles acquire sufficient energy to escape from the metal and produce electrifica- tion in the surrounding gas. We might expect too that, if we could charge a metal so highly with negative electricity, that the work done by the electric field on the corpuscle in a distance not greater than the sphere of action of the atoms on the corpuscles was greater than the energy required for a corpuscle to escape, then, the corpuscles would escape and negative electricity stream from the metal. In this case the discharge could be effected without the participation of the gas surrounding the metal and might even take place in an absolute vacuum, if we could produce such a thing. We have as yet no evidence of this kind of discharge, unless indeed some of the interesting results recently obtained by Earhart with very short sparks should be indica- tions of an effect of this kind.

A very interesting case of the spontaneous emission of corpuscles is that of the radio-active substance radium discovered by M. and Madame Curie. Radium gives out negatively electrified corpuscles which are deflected by a magnet. Becquerel has determined the ratio of the mass to the charge of the radium corpuscles and finds it is the same as for the corpuscles in the cathode rays. The velocity of the radium corpuscles is, however, greater than any that has hitherto been observed for either cathode or Lenard rays: being, as Becquerel found, as much as 2 $$\times$$ 1010 centimeters per second or two-thirds the velocity of light. This enormous velocity explains why the corpuscles from radium are so very much more penetrating than the corpuscles from cathode or Lenard rays; the difference in this respect is very striking, for while the latter can only penetrate solids when they are beaten out into the thinnest films, the corpuscles from radium have been found by Curie to be able to penetrate a piece of glass 3 milli- meters thick. To see how an increase in the velocity can increase the penetrating power, let us take as an illustration of a collision between the corpuscle and the particles of the metal the case of a charged corpuscle moving past an electrified body; a collision may be said to occur between these when the corpuscle comes so close to the charged body that its direction of motion after passing the body differs appre- ciably from that with which it started. A simple calculation shows that the deflection of the corpuscle will only be considerable when the kinetic energy, with which the corpuscle starts on its journey towards the charged body is not large compared with the work done