Soap-Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them

by C. V. Boys

I think then I have now done enough to show that on the surface of water there is a kind of elastic skin. I do not mean that there is anything that is not water on the surface, but that the water while there acts in a different way to what it does inside, and that it acts as if it were an elastic skin made of something like very thin india-rubber, only that it is perfectly and absolutely elastic, which india-rubber is not.

You will now be in a position to understand how it is that in narrow tubes water does not find its own level, but behaves in an unexpected manner. I have placed in front of the lantern a dish of water coloured blue so that you may the more easily see it. I shall now dip into the water a very narrow glass pipe, and immediately the water rushes up and stands about half an inch above the general level. The tube inside is wet. The elastic skin of the water is therefore attached to the tube, and goes on pulling up the water until the weight of the water raised above the general level is equal to the force exerted by the skin. If I take a tube about twice as big, then this pulling action which is going on all round the tube will cause it to lift twice the weight of water, but this will not make the water rise twice as high, because the larger tube holds so much more water for a given length than the smaller tube. It will not even pull it up as high as it did in the case of the smaller tube, because if it were pulled up as high the weight of the water raised would in that case be four times as great, and not only twice as great, as you might at first think. It will therefore only raise the water in the larger tube to half the height, and now that the two tubes are side by side you see the water in the smaller tube standing twice as high as it does in the larger tube. In the same way, if I were to take a tube as fine as a hair the water would go up ever so much higher. It is for this reason that this is called Capillarity, from the Latin word capillus, a hair, because the action is so marked in a tube the size of a hair.

Fig. 8.

Supposing now you had a great number of tubes of all sizes, and placed them in a row with the smallest on one side and all the others in the order of their sizes, then it is evident that the water would rise highest in the smallest tube and less and less high in each tube in the row (Fig. 8), until when you came to a very large tube you would not be able to see that the water was raised at all. You can very easily obtain the same kind of effect by simply taking two square pieces of window glass and placing them face to face with a common match or small fragment of anything to keep them a small distance apart along one edge while they meet together along the opposite edge. An india-rubber ring stretched over them will hold them in this position. I now take this pair of plates and stand it in a dish of coloured water, and you at once see that the water creeps up to the top of the plates on the edge where they meet, and as the distance between the plates gradually increases, so the height to which the water rises gradually gets less, and the result is that the surface of the liquid forms a beautifully regular curve which is called by mathematicians a rectangular hyperbola (Fig. 9). I shall have presently to say more about this and some other curves, and so I shall not do more now than state that the hyperbola is formed because as the width between the plates gets greater the height gets less, or, what comes to the same thing, because the weight of liquid pulled up at any small part of the curve is always the same.

Fig. 9.

If the plates or the tubes had been made of material not wetted by water, then the effect of the tension of the surface would be to drag the liquid away from the narrow spaces, and the more so as the spaces were narrower. As it is not easy to show this well with paraffined glass plates or tubes and water, I shall use another liquid which does not wet or touch clean glass, namely, quicksilver. As it is not possible to see through quicksilver, it will not do to put a narrow tube into this liquid to show that the level is lower in the tube than in the surrounding vessel, but the same result may be obtained by having a wide and a narrow tube joined together. Then, as you see upon the screen, the quicksilver is lower in the narrow than in the wide tube, whereas in a similar apparatus the reverse is the case with water (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10.