People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 May 1893 — AIR IN LIQUID FORM. [ARTICLE]

AIR IN LIQUID FORM.

Interesting Experiments Performed Recently by Prof. Dewar, of I.ondon. Prof. Dewar gave a very interesting lecture at the Royal institution a few • days ago on liquefied oxygen and liquefied air, says the London Spectator. He produced both liquefied oxygen and liquefied air, the oxygen injnnts. Even the liquefied air was handed around in claret glasses. Liquid oxygen boils m air at minus 182 degrees centigrade—that is 182 degrees of the centigrade scale below zero. The liquid oxygen placed between the poles of Faraday’s great magnet behaved like a metal, leaping up to. the poles and clinging to them till it disappeared as gas. But liquid oxygen, though so strongly magnetic, is a very bad conductor of electricity. It is a non-conducting magnet. He showed, too, that so far as chemists can judge, there is probably no oxygen in the sun—the oxygen of the earth’s atmosphere accounting for all the oxygen lines in the solar specturm. The boiling point of liquid air is minus 192 degrees centigrade or ten degrees lower than that of oxygen. It is not true, as had been supposed, that the oxygen in the air liquefies before the other elements in air; on the contrary, the air liquefies as air and is not resolved into its elements before liquefying. If this globe were cooled down to 200 degrees below the centigrade it would be covered with a sea of liquefied gas thirty-five feet deep, of which about seven feet would be liquid oxygen.