Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 60.djvu/170

Rh into the circulating liquid, and cooled quickly to — 0'5° or —0'7J. It is then transferred to a copper cylinder lined with polished metal, placed in the centre of the thermostat, an annular space of about 1 cm. being left between them. The thermometer whose zero is to be taken is then quickly fixed in position in a spring clamp, the bulb and a considerable length of the stem above the zero being immersed in the water. A crystal of ice is dropped in, and the temperature quickly rises to the freezing point.

For the details of the arrangement for the illumination of the divisions, and taking the readings through the mass of the liquid containing the ice crystals in suspension, reference must be made to the paper.

The amount of ice formed in the liquid varies of course with the undercooling. Experiments made with good mercurial thermometers showed that if ice be present in sufficient quantity, the final temperature attained by the mixture of ice and water is not influenced perceptibly by variation of the temperature of the circulating liquid within fairly wide limits. As, however, it is extremely doubtful whether the indications of any mercurial thermometer can be relied on beyond 0‘001°, it seemed desirable to control this result by some other means.

A platinum thermometer and bridge were therefore designed, capable of indicating with certainty a change of 0’0001°, and a description of the whole arrangement employed to attain this degree of accuracy forms the second half of the paper. The resistances in the bridge were of manganin, whose temperature coefficient is only about that of the usual resistance alloys, and the plugs usually employed for short circuiting the coils were replaced by copper bars and mercury contacts of specially low resistance. The thermometers employed were of about 10 ohms resistance, and were provided with the compensating leads, devised by Mr. Callendar. The maximum current which can be used in accurate measurements wdth these thermometers is about 0'02 ampere, aud therefore the galvanometer employed required to be extremely sensitive. The instrument selected was a low resistance astatic one with vertical needle system of the type described by Weiss, and gives at the greatest sensibility at which the zero is steady one scale division for 1 x 10-10 ampere at 2500 scale divisions distance.

With this arrangement the influence of various conditions on the final temperature attained by the mixture of ice and water was studied. The results were found to be in close agreement with the theoretical deductions of Nernst, and it was found that with the right conditions, it was quite easy to keep the temperature in the fieezing vessel constant, to within one or two ten-thousandths of a degree for an hour at a time.