A course of six lectures on the chemical history of a candle : to which is added, a lecture on platinum / by Michael Faraday ; edited by William Crookes.

  • Michael Faraday
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A course of six lectures on the chemical history of a candle : to which is added, a lecture on platinum / by Michael Faraday ; edited by William Crookes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    sensible to you in the form of the old philo- sophic wool, as it was called? We shall have left in that crucible, also, a quantity of this woolly matter. But I will take a piece of this same zinc, and make an experiment a little more closely at home, as it were. You will have here the same thing happening. Here is the piece of zinc; there [pointing to a jet of hydrogen] is the furnace, and we will set to work and try and burn the metal. It glows, you see; there is the combustion; and there is the white substance into which it burns. And so, if I take that flame of hydrogen as the representative of a candle, and show you a sub- stance like zinc burning in the flame, you will see that it was merely during the action of combustion that this substance glowed—while it was kept hot; and if I take a flame of hy- drogen and put this white substance from the zinc into it, look how beautifully it glows, and just because it is a solid substance. I will now take such a flame as I had a moment since, and set free from it the particles of carbon. Here is some camphine, which will burn with a smoke; but if I send these particles of smoke through this pipe into the hydrogen