FOOTNOTES:
[C] The plates which I have mostly used have been Thomas's A 1 ordinary.
CHAPTER II
THE SPLASH OF A DROP—LOW FALL
We will now turn to the photographic record itself. The first series shows the splash of a drop of water weighing ·2 of a gram, and therefore 7·36 millimetres (or rather less than one-third of an inch) in diameter, falling 40 cm. (about 16 inches) into milk mixed with water. The object of adding milk to the water was to make it more visible. The addition of milk makes, as we shall see, a little but not much difference in the general character of the splash. The scale of the figures is three-quarters of the actual size.
The number written against any figure gives, on the assumption that no unobserved error has crept in, the time in decimal parts of a second that has elapsed since the stage marked "T = 0," which is nearest to the first instant of contact. The reader will understand from what has been said that the error in any of these times may be as much as two-thousandths of a second, but is not likely to be more than that, when all precautions were taken.
It will be observed that as the drop descends into the liquid the upper portion is at first not appreciably distorted, but that a little cup or crater of liquid is thrown up round it. As the drop descends further, this crater grows wider and higher and thicker in the wall, and jets are shot out from its edge or rim. These jets are visible even in the second figure. The black marks on the inside wall of the crater are due to the lamp-black carried down with the drop from the smoked surface of the supporting cup: though in one sense a disfigurement, they serve to show by their presence that the interior of the crater is lined by the original liquid which formed the drop, and thus afford useful information as to the nature of the flow.
The crater rises with great rapidity up to Fig. 4. In Fig. 5 the walls are beginning to grow thicker, while the next three figures show the crater subsiding and widening, till in Fig. 9 it lies as a mere ring of lobes on the surface, surrounding a central hollow.