Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/283

Rh more rapid oscillation sideways. If I turn the leveling-screw so as to raise the beam and weight, the nearer it approaches the horizontal position the slower the oscillation becomes, and the more delicate is the instrument. Here is the actual apparatus that I tried to work with. The weight at the end is a piece of pith; in the centre is a glass mirror, on which to throw a ray of light, so as to enable me to see the movements by a luminous index. The instrument, inclosed in glass and exhausted of air, was mounted on a stand with leveling-screws, and with it I tried the action of a ray of light falling on the pith. I found that I could get any amount of sensitiveness that I liked; but it was not only sensitive to the impact of a ray of light, it was immeasurably more so to a change of horizontality. It was, in fact, too delicate for me to work with. The slightest elevation of one end of the instrument altered the sensitiveness, or the position of the



zero-point, to such a degree that it was impossible to try any experiments with it in such a place as London. A person stepping from one room to another altered the position of the centre of gravity of the house. If I walked from one side of my own laboratory to the other, I tilted the house over sufficiently to upset the equilibrium of the apparatus. Children playing in the street disturbed it. Prof. Rood, who has worked with an apparatus of this kind in America, finds that an elevation of its side equal to $1⁄36000000$ part of an inch is sufficient to be shown on the instrument. It was therefore out of the question to use an instrument of this construction, so I tried another form (shown in Fig. 4), in which a fine glass beam, having disks of pith at each end, is suspended horizontally by a line glass fibre, the whole being sealed up in glass and perfectly exhausted. To the centre of oscillation a glass mirror is attached.

Now, a glass fibre has the property of always coming back to zero when it is twisted out of its position. It is almost, if not quite, a perfectly elastic body. I will show this by a simple experiment. This is a long glass fibre hanging vertically, and having an horizontal bar