Birds and All Nature, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1900 / Illustrated by Color Photography

by Various

LIQUID AIR.

MANY substances have three forms—solid, liquid, and gaseous. It takes cold to change a gas to a liquid, and more cold to reduce the liquid to a solid. Steam, water, and ice are good examples.

Air is a substance that requires so much cold to reduce it even to a liquid state that we know nothing of it as a solid. Our Smithsonian Institution gave Professor Dewar of the Royal Institute of London a gold medal for his discovery in regard to reducing it to a liquid.

No artificial cold is intense enough to affect air except when it is confined under great pressure. When a gas is compressed and made cold it tends to liquefy. But it takes enormous pressure and intense cold to make liquid air.

It is a grayish substance that may be carried about like water. It has a tendency to steam up, and when its vapor comes into contact with flesh a cooling sensation is produced. But living flesh cannot long remain in contact with the liquid itself. It produces a wound much like a burn.

By careful use of liquid air in surgery, the flesh may be so put to sleep that the surgeon's knife is not felt by the patient as he watches the cutting. A cancer has been cut out by liquid air in a sort of burning process that needed no knife. Cremation has been accomplished by its use.

Cremation is burning. Burning is the union of oxygen with the substance consumed. Liquid air left exposed to common air evaporates and sends out its nitrogen so that almost pure liquid oxygen is left in the vessel. This placed in contact with the body to be consumed soon sends all except its mineral parts flying away in the atmosphere in a vapor thinner than smoke.

It is the coldest substance known. It takes an intense cold to produce it, and it has to remain cold much as ice is cold, only very much more so, as long as it is liquid air. For this reason it is carried about in vessels constructed so as to exclude the heat. Mercury dropped into it becomes a solid block, and meat quickly freezes so hard that it is brittle as glass and may be broken into a thousand pieces.