Record Made on a Stationary Surface by the Vibrations of the Japanese Earthquake of July 19, 1891.
Showing the complicated character of the motion (common to most earthquakes), and also the course of a point at the centre of disturbance.
In addition to the first instrument set up by Professor Milne in Tokio in 1883, which is still recording earthquakes, there are now in operation about twenty other seismographs in various parts of the world, so that earthquake information is becoming very accurate and complete, and there is even an attempt being made to predict earthquakes just as the weather bureau predicts storms. In any event Professor Milne's invention must within a few years add greatly to our knowledge of the wonders of the planet on which we live.
CHAPTER IV
ELECTRICAL FURNACES
How the Hottest Heat is Produced—Making Diamonds
No feats of discovery, not even the search for the North Pole or Stanley's expeditions in the heart of Africa, present more points of fascinating interest than the attempts now being made by scientists to explore the extreme limits of temperature. We live in a very narrow zone in what may be called the great world of heat. The cut on the opposite page represents an imaginary thermometer showing a few of the important temperature points between the depths of the coldest cold and the heights of the hottest heat—a stretch of some 10,461 degrees. We exist in a narrow space, as you will see, varying from 100° or a little more above the zero point to a possible 50° below; that is, we can withstand these narrow extremes of temperature. If some terrible world catastrophe should raise the temperature of our summers or lower that of our winters by a very few degrees, human life would perish off the earth.
But though we live in such narrow limits, science has found ways of exploring the great heights of heat above us and of reaching and measuring the depths of cold below us, with the result of making many important and interesting discoveries.
I have written in the former "Boys' Book of Inventions" of that wonderful product of science, liquid air—air submitted to such a degree of cold that it ceases to be a gas and becomes a liquid. This change occurs at a temperature 312° below zero. Professor John Dewar, of England, who has made some of the most interesting of discoveries in the region of great cold, not only reached a temperature low enough to produce liquid air, but he succeeded in going on down until he could freeze this marvellous liquid into a solid—a sort of air ice. Not content even with this astonishing degree of cold, Professor Dewar continued his experiments until he could reduce hydrogen—that very light gas—to a liquid, at 440° below zero, and then, strange as it may seem, he also froze liquid hydrogen into a solid. From his experiments he finally concluded that the "absolute zero"—that is, the place where there is no heat—was at a point 461° below zero. And he has been able to produce a temperature, artificially, within a very few degrees of this utmost limit of cold.
Think what this absolute zero means. Heat, we know, like electricity and light, is a vibratory or wave motion in the ether. The greater the heat, the faster the vibrations. We think of all the substances around us as solids, liquids, and gases, but these are only comparative terms. A change of temperature changes the solid into the liquid, or the gas into the solid. Take water, for instance. In the ordinary temperature of summer it is a liquid, in winter it is a hard crystalline substance called ice; apply the heat of a stove and it becomes steam, a gas. So with all other substances. Air to us is an invisible gas, but if the earth should suddenly drop in temperature to 312° below zero all the air would fall in liquid drops like rain and fill the valleys of the earth with lakes and oceans. Still a little colder and these lakes and oceans would freeze into solids. Similarly, steel seems to us a very hard and solid substance, but apply enough heat and it boils like water, and finally, if the heat be increased, it becomes a gas.