Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/604

578 the film upon one side of the thread, and leave it uninjured upon the other. The surface-tension, destroyed upon one side, will remain in action in the unruptured film, and therefore we should expect the thread to be pulled toward the uninjured side. We can easily put the matter to the test of experiment. I break one side by touching it with a hot wire, and what we foresaw occurs, the thread is instantly pulled toward the side which the wire did not tear. This experiment proves that the surface of a liquid is in a state of tension. I have, however, another experiment to show you upon the same point, which will add to our knowledge upon the subject, for it will not only show that the tension exists on the surface, but that in different liquids it exists in different degrees of intensity. You now see upon the screen the image of a few drops of colored water, which are placed upon a glass plate. I dip a glass rod into some pure water, and touch the colored film with the drop which adheres to the end. As you see, nothing very particular happens. There is only a slight diminution of the blueness in the centre, owing to the fact that the colored water has been mixed with the pure water. Now, I will dip the rod into alcohol, and you will see a different result. As soon as I touch the blue water with the alcohol a motion occurs, and it moves rapidly away from the point at which the contact took place. Now, let us consider shortly what the explanation of this phenomenon is. The surface of the water and the surface of the alcohol are alike in a state of tension; but the tension of the surface of the water is greater than that at the surface of the alcohol. At the moment I put the drop of alcohol upon the water we had a small drop of alcohol surrounded by a large quantity of water, and between the two there was a line of demarkation, which we may, for simplicity's sake, liken to the thread you saw just now. When I destroyed the force of the tension in the first experiment on the one side, the force which remained on the other side pulled the thread toward it. In this case the force was acting on both sides; but the force at the surface of the water pulling away from the centre of the alcohol-drop was greater than the force at the surface of the alcohol-drop pulling toward its centre. The consequence was, that we obtained a motion in the direction in which the greater force was acting—that is, in the direction in which the water was pulling away from the centre; and this continued the water and alcohol moving farther and farther away, until the two became entirely mixed together. An experiment similar to this may be performed after dinner in the evening: When we pour some wine into a glass we generally in doing so wet the sides, and the result is, a thin film of liquid adheres to them above that portion of the glass which is filled with wine. This film soon contracts into drops, and each of these drops consists, as all wine does, of a mixture of water, alcohol, and certain other substances, the presence of which we may for the moment neglect. Alcohol, as you know, is an extremely volatile fluid,