This subject may be illustrated by the phenomena which first suggested the undulatory theory to the mind of Hooke. These are the colours of thin transparent films of all kinds, known as the colours of thin plates. In this relation no object in the world possesses a deeper scientific interest than a common soap-bubble. And here let me say emerges one of the difficulties which the student of pure science encounters in the presence of 'practical' communities like those of America and England; it is not to be expected that such communities can entertain any profound sympathy with labours which seem so far removed from the domain of practice as are many of the labours of the man of science. Imagine Dr. Draper spending his days in blowing soap-bubbles and in studying their colours! Would you show him the necessary patience, or grant him the necessary support? And yet be it remembered it was thus that minds like those of Boyle, Newton and Hooke were occupied; and that on such experiments has been founded a theory, the issues of which are incalculable. I see no other way for you, laymen, than to trust the scientific man with the choice of his inquiries; he stands before the tribunal of his peers, and by their verdict on his labours you ought to abide.
Whence, then, are derived the colours of the soap-bubble? Imagine a beam of white light impinging on the bubble. When it reaches the first surface of the film, a known fraction of the light is reflected back. But a large portion of the beam enters the film, reaches its second surface, and is again in part reflected. The waves from the second surface thus turn back and hotly pursue the waves from the first surface. And, if the thickness of the film be such as to cause the necessary retardation, the two systems of waves interfere with each other, producing augmented or diminished light, as the case may be.
But, inasmuch as the waves of light are of different lengths, it is plain that, to produce extinction in the case of the longer waves, a greater thickness of film is necessary than in the case of the shorter ones. Different colours, therefore, must appear at different thicknesses of the film.
Take with you a little bottle of spirit of turpentine, and pour it into one of your country ponds. You will then see the glowing of those colours over the surface of the water. On a small scale we produce them thus: A common tea-tray is filled with water, beneath the surface of which dips the end of a pipette. A beam of light falls upon the water, and is reflected by it to the screen. Spirit of turpentine is poured into the pipette; it descends, issues from the end in minute drops, which rise in succession to the surface. On reaching it, each drop spreads suddenly out as a film, and glowing colours immediately flash forth upon the screen. The colours change as the thickness of the film changes by evaporation. They are also arranged in zones, in consequence of the gradual diminution of thickness from the centre outwards.
Any film whatever will produce these colours. The film of air between two plates of glass squeezed together, exhibits, as shown by Hooke, rich fringes of colour. A particularly fine example of these fringes is now before you. Nor is even air necessary; the rupture of optical continuity suffices. Smite with an axe the black, transparent ice—black, because it is pure and of great depth—under the moraine of a glacier; you readily produce in the interior flaws which no air can reach, and from these flaws the colours of thin plates sometimes break like fire. But the source of most historic interest is, as already stated, the soap-bubble. With one of the mixtures employed by the eminent blind philosopher, Plateau, in his researches on the cohesion figures of thin films, we obtain in still air a bubble ten or twelve inches in diameter. You may look at the bubble itself, or you may look at its projection upon the screen; rich colours arranged in zones are, in both cases, exhibited. Rendering the beam parallel, and permitting it to impinge upon the sides, bottom, and top of the bubble, gorgeous fans of colour, reflected from the bubble, overspread the screen, rotating as the beam is carried round. By this experiment the internal motions of the film are also strikingly displayed.
Not in a moment are great theories elaborated: the facts which demand them become first prominent; then, to the period of observation succeeds a period of pondering and of tentative explanation. By such efforts the human mind is gradually prepared for the final theoretic illumination. The colours of thin plates, for example, occupied the attention of Robert Boyle. In his 'Experimental History of Colours' he contends against the schools which affirmed that colour was 'a penetrative quality that reaches to the innermost parts of the object,' adducing opposing facts. 'To give you a first instance,' he says, 'I shall need but to remind you of what I told you a little after the beginning of this essay, touching the blue and red and yellow that may be produced upon a piece of tempered steel; for these colours, though they be very vivid, yet if you break the steel they adorn, they will appear to be but superficial.' He then describes, in phraseology which shows the delight he took in his work, the following beautiful experiment:—
'We took a quantity of clean lead, and melted it with a strong fire, and then immediately pouring it out into a clean vessel of convenient shape and matter (we used one of iron, that the great and sudden heat might not injure it), and then carefully and nimbly taking off the scum that floated on the top, we perceived, as we expected, the smooth and glossy surface of the melted matter to be adorned with a very glorious colour, which, being as transitory as delightful, did almost immediately give place to another vivid colour, and that was as quickly succeeded by a third, and this, as it were, chased away by a fourth; and so these wonderfully vivid colours successively appeared and vanished till the metal ceasing to be hot enough to hold any longer this pleasing spectacle, the colours that chanced to adorn the surface when the lead thus began to cool remained upon it, but were so superficial that how little soever we scraped off the surface of the lead, we did, in such places, scrape off all the colour.' 'These things,' he adds, 'suggested to me some thoughts or ravings which I have not now time to acquaint you with.'[13]
He extends his observations to essential oils and spirits of wine, 'which being shaken till they have good store of bubbles, those bubbles will (if attentively considered) appear adorned with various and lovely colours, which all immediately vanish upon the retrogressing of the liquid which affords these bubbles their skins into the rest of the oil.' He also refers to the colour of glass films. 'I have seen one that was skilled in fashioning glasses by the help of a lamp blowing some of them so strongly as to burst them; whereupon it was found that the tenacity of the metal was such that before it broke it suffered itself to be reduced into films so extremely thin that they constantly showed upon their surface the varying colours of the rainbow.'[14]
Subsequent to Boyle the colours of thin plates occupied the attention of Robert Hooke, in whose writings we find a dawning of the undulatory theory of light. He describes with great distinctness the colours obtained with thin flakes of 'Muscovy glass' (talc), also those surrounding flaws in crystals where optical continuity is destroyed. He shows very clearly the dependence of the colour upon the thickness of the film, and proves by microscopic observation that plates of a uniform thickness yield uniform colours. 'If,' he says, 'you take any small piece of the Muscovy glass, and with a needle, or some other convenient instrument, cleave it oftentimes into thinner and thinner laminæ, you shall find that until you come to a determinate thinness of them they shall appear transparent and colourless; but if you continue to split and divide them further, you shall find at last that each plate shall appear most lovely tinged or imbued with a determinate colour. If, further, by any means you so flaw a pretty thick piece that one part begins to cleave a little from the other, and between these two there be gotten some pellucid medium, those laminated or pellucid bodies that fill that space shall exhibit several rainbows or coloured lines, the colours of which will be disposed and ranged according to the various thicknesses of the several parts of the plate.' He then describes fully and clearly the experiment with pressed glasses already referred to:—
'Take two small pieces of ground and polished looking-glass plate, each about the bigness of a shilling: take these two dry, and with your forefingers and thumbs press them very hard and close together, and you shall find that when they approach each other very near there will appear several irises or coloured lines, in the same manner almost as in the Muscovy glass; and you may very easily change any of the colours of any part of the interposed body by pressing the plates closer and harder together, or leaving them more lax—that is, a part which appeared coloured with a red, may presently be tinged with a yellow, blue, green, purple, or the like. 'Any substance,' he says, 'provided it be thin and transparent, will show these colours.' Like Boyle, he obtained them with glass films; he also procured them with bubbles of pitch, rosin, colophony, turpentine, solutions of several gums, as gum arabic in water, any glutinous liquor, as wort, wine, spirit of wine, oyl of turpentine, glare of snails, &c.