Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1894 — LIQUIFIED AIR. [ARTICLE]

LIQUIFIED AIR.

Tho Reason Why Samples Cannot , .Be Sent Around. - - Westminster Gazette. Professor Dewar recently delivdeeply attentive audience, the first of a series of three lectures on “The Solid and Liquid States of Matter” — a subject which he has maklepeculiarly his own. Quoting Bacon’s expression that heat and cold were the two hands by which nature chiefly works, he remarked on the difficulty of recording the alteration of volume in the transition of a body from a liquid to a solid state, as the particles were about fourteen times more widely separated in a gaseous . than in a solid condition; but even then they were so close together that they harL to be represented by a unit less that The 250,000 th part of an inch. It is not surprising to learn Thati:hc;-Professor-is-ofteft-asked-fer-samples of his liquid air to exhibit at country . lectures, but as it requires not only enormous pressure, but a temperature of 150 degrees below the freezing point to keep it in its fluid state, liquid air is not easily carried about. Among the many beautiful experiments with which‘Dr. Dewar illustrated his lecture was one in which nitrous oxide, evaporated in a vacuum, parted so rapidly with its heat that the remaining liquid was immediately frozen. Carbonic acid gas was liquified under great pressure. At the next lecture the Professor will exhibit some of the latest results of his striking researches.