Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/218

214 A porcelain rod introduced into the lower part of a flame cooled it and decreased its light, but collected no carbon, while, if introduced into the upper part, its under side became coated with soot. Heumann argued that if Frankland was right and the light is reflected from dense hydrocarbon vapors, these should be condensed on all sides of the rod at once in a quiet flame, while, as a matter of fact, soot was deposited only on the under side; and furthermore, soot can also be collected upon a surface too hot to condense hydrocarbons at all. He therefore concluded that the surface merely stops carbon which is formed lower down in the flame. If one luminous flame is allowed to play against another, the carbon is rolled up and can be seen as glowing particles in the outer non-luminous sheath.

Frankland had said that flames can not contain solid particles because they are transparent. Heumann pointed out that thick flames are opaque and that thin ones are no more transparent than is an equal layer of soot rising from burning turpentine; the rapidity of the motion of the particles preventing any obstruction to the view, just as is the case with a rapidly revolving, spoked wheel.

Heumann next took up the phenomena of shadows and showed that the luminous portion casts a definite shadow when interposed between sunlight and a screen, and that the shadow is continuous for a luminous turpentine flame and the column of soot above it. And further, that a hydrogen flame which ordinarily casts no shadow and gives no light will cast a sharp shadow and emit a fairly bright light if passed through suspended lampblack or if it sweeps any solid matter into the flame. Luminous vapors do not cast shadows, absorption bands being very different from true shadows.

C. J. Burch found that when sunlight is reflected from a luminous flame it is polarized, while if reflected by glowing vapors, however dense, it does not exhibit this phenomenon. Sunlight which was reflected and refracted by luminous flames was found to exhibit phenomena identical with that reflected and refracted by non-luminous flames rendered luminous by the introduction of solid matter, and also with light reflected, and refracted by very finely divided solid matter held in suspension in a liquid. The phenomena presented by like experiments with glowing vapors were totally different. All of Burch 's work was confirmed by Stokes some years later.

There was now left no shadow of doubt about carbon being the source of the light rays, and the next question that concerned investigators was the chemical changes which give rise to carbon particles.

Sir Humphry Davy thought the separation of carbon to be due to a decomposition of the hydrocarbon compounds (of which all illuminants are composed) within the flame where the air is in smallest quantity, and no other cause was assigned by other investigators. Prior to