Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1879 — The Sun's Power. [ARTICLE]

The Sun's Power.

In an interesting and eloquent paper on “The Sun Source of Power,” just pub'ished in the Scientific American, Prof. Langly takes the following method of-giving some,idea of the work performed by the sun’s heat on our earth, which receives only a small fraction of the enormous quantity sent out yearly from the center of our system. Assuming the area of Manhattan Island to be twenty miles and the annual rain fall thirty inches, he shows by a simple calculation that this small portion of the earth receives 1,398,920,000 cubic feet, or 38,781,600 tons, of rain in a year. “The amount of this,” he says, may be better appreciated by comparison. Thus, the Pyramid of Cheops contains less titan 100,000,000 cubic feet aud weighs less than 7,000,000 tons; aud this water, then in the form of ice, would many times replace the largest Pyramid of Egypt. If we had to cart it away it would require 3,241,800 cars carrying 12 tons cacli to remove it and these, at an average length of 30 feet to the car, would make six traius, each reaching in one continuous line of cars acooss the cbminaut, so that the leading locomotive of each train would be at San Francisco before the rear had left New York.” A day’s rain fall of one-tenth of an inch spread over the United States represents ten thousand million of tons, aud would take, he states more than all the pumping-en-gines whieh supply Philadelphia, Chicago and other large cities depending more or less on steam for portable water, working day and night for a century, to put it back to the height to which it was raised by the suu before it fell. It has been found by carful experiment that the effect of the heat of a vertical sun in the month of March, acting on a square foot of the earth’s surface, after having lost a .portion of its energy through absorption by our atmosphere, is equivalent to 0,132 horse power, and other problems with equally startling results can be readily framed from this other accessible data.