Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 60.djvu/406

Rh the absorption bands nearly disappeared, so that the heating could not have been the cause of the apparently enormous production of N02 at high pressure. We next tried whether oxygen blown into the arc would burn up the carbons, but found it did not do so to any serious extent, and so tried the arc in a compressed atmosphere of this gas.

The arc burned very nicely indeed in the oxygen, the carbons keeping a good shape, and a very steady crater. The oxygen was, however, so contaminated with nitrogen that at high pressure enormous quantities of N 02 were again formed, so that we could not proceed further with the radiation experiments. The arc was a bright blue bead, about the size of a pea, and the spectrum was a beautiful banded one.

From these results we concluded that the reduction of radiation, and red-hot appearance of the crater in the former experiments in nitrogen, were due to its being contaminated with oxygen and to the large quantities of N 02, which were formed by the arc when under pressure.

We next tried the arc in hydrogen. The gas was obtained as pure, but contained hydrocarbons as an impurity, possibly from having been compressed into a cylinder which had previously been charged with coal-gas.

The arc in hydrogen at atmospheric pressures was a long, thin flame, that moved as far up the carbons as possible; especially on the negative carbon it walked up a cm. along the cone. It went so far that it fuzed the copper ring that held the negative carbon, and we had to replace it by an iron wire lashing. It was very unsteady, and trees of soot and a deposit of hard graphitic carbon formed on this positive carbon as if there were electrolysis of the hydrocarbon, and carbon were electro-negative compared with hydrogen. This growth took place all round the crater, while there was no tendency for anything to grow on the negative carbon.

The arc was only 5—6 mm. wide, and sometimes over 2 cm. long. There was a green outer flame, with a bright red line not a mm. wide down the middle of it. Where it impinged on the negative carbon there was a bright red flame from the middle of the bright spot on the carbon. The outer greenish part seemed to give much the same spectrum as the green cone in a Bunsen burner, while the red flame and line was undoubtedly glowing hydrogen. As we saw the C and F hydrogen lines very distinctly, the red C line being dazzlingly bright and not nearly so wide as in a coil spark at atmospheric pressure whenever the image of the red part of the arc was thrown on the slit of the spectroscope, the appearance was quite like that of a solar prominence.

The end of the positive carbon was pitted into a number of craters