Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 January 1902 — Non-Conductor of Electricity. [ARTICLE]

Non-Conductor of Electricity.

Prof. Trowbridge of Harvard university prints in the Philosophical Magazine researches which lead him to the conclusion that pure hydrogen is a non-conductor of electricity. An electric discharge cannot penetrate an atmosphere of pure hydrogen, nor, in fact, any gas. In ordinary cases the. spark is transmitted by the ions, resulting from the decomposition of water. Schumann has shown that pure hydrogen at atmospheric pressure transmits ultra-violet rays as freely as the most perfect vacuum. Hence, this gas, by Maxwell’s theory, must be a non-conductor. Prof. Dewar has also shown experimentally that liquid hydrogen is a non-conductor. The Limit of Microscopic Power. Prof. McKendrick, in his presidential address to the physiology section of the British association, in September, remarked that the smallest particle of matter that can be seen with our present microscopes is between one-four-hundred-thousandth and oneof an inch in diameter. The diffraction of light in the microscope forbids the possibility of seeing still smaller objects. Yet the living spores studied by physiologists are sometimes, probably, even smaller In size than the most minute particla that the most perfect microscope can show. —Youth’s Companion.