FOUR HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO.
AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES DEWAR.
By Henry J. W. Dam.
The science of chemistry, like that of geography, has its undiscovered North Pole. Four hundred and sixty-one degrees below the freezing point of the Fahrenheit thermometer (−274° C.) lies a mysterious, specially indicated degree of cold which science has long been gazing toward and striving to attain, wondering meanwhile what may be the conditions of matter at this unexplored point. Its existence has long been indicated and its position established in two different ways, viz., the regularly diminishing volumes of gases, and the steady falling off in the resistance made by pure metals to the passage through them of electricity under increasing degrees of cold. This point, to which both these processes tend as an ultimate, is called the zero of absolute temperature. By more than one eminent observer it is supposed to be the temperature of inter-stellar space, the normal temperature of the universe. Whether or not this supposition be correct, the efforts which have been made and are still in progress to reach this degree of cold have been many, diverse, and ingenious; the equipment of the explorer being not boats, condensed foods, and the general machinery of ice exploration, but all the varied resources of mechanics and of chemistry which can be combined to compass the extremest degrees of cold.
All the world has heard of Professor James Dewar, and of his late great triumphs in the liquefaction of oxygen gas and the solidification of nitrogen and air. The sensation caused by his extraordinary results won him at once the congratulations of many scientific men, the profuse encomiums of the press, and the flattering recognition of appreciative royal personages. This was largely due to the fact that in the search for this unknown and mysterious point he had plunged much deeper than any chemist before him into the regions of low temperature, and had arrived within sixty degrees Centigrade of the point itself. This exciting and not uneventful journey downward did not take him beyond the confines of his own laboratory, but his description of it, as well as of the properties of matter under extreme cold, has something of the fascination, to the mind possessed of ordinary chemical curiosity, of the story of a Stanley, a Nansen, or a Peary, describing the peculiarities of countries in which they, of all men, have been the first to set their feet.
Professor Dewar, who was born in Kincardine-on-Forth in 1842, was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where his natural and special gifts as a chemist were developed by Sir Lyon Playfair, at that time Professor of Chemistry in the university. The perspicacity and tenacity of purpose which are characteristic of so many Scotchmen were eminently the inheritance of Sir Lyon’s young assistant, and between that period and the present a long series of original investigations in all departments of chemistry have won for Professor Dewar at his prime the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the degree of Doctor of Laws, and other dignities, which make great alphabetical richness after his name upon scientific occasions of state. Personally, he is of middle height and strong build, with a clearly cut face, full of character. His speech, faintly flavored with the accent of Scotia, is exact and emphatic; and his manner, whether he is concentrated upon a scientific demonstration in his laboratory or traversing the speculative questions of the hour in ordinary conversation in his drawing-room, has the earnestness of the profound scientist, very agreeably tempered by the polish of the traveller and cosmopolitan man of the world. His absorption in scientific pursuits has not denied him a very marked esthetic development, and his residential suite of apartments at the Royal Institution is filled with treasures, rare tapestries, bronzes, and carvings, picked up at continental dépôts or purchased at the sales of great collections, which would make a highly interesting article in themselves. To her husband’s scientific sense of the value of age in wines, Mrs. Dewar adds her original researches in the matter of choice teas, and it is averred by the eminent membership of the Royal Institution that the degree of domestic civilization which prevails on the third floor of the building is quite as high and more potentially attractive than the stage of scientific civilization which rules in the theatre, the libraries, and the laboratories of the floors below. Like most Scotchmen, however, Professor Dewar is simple in his tastes, and is more deeply stirred by a frozen gas or an antique bronze than anything in the way of bisques or suprêmes. His heart, which shows no signs of low temperature, is mainly in his laboratory, and he leads the way there, down a flight of stone steps to the basement, with a readiness that very clearly exhibits his latent enthusiasm.
THE LABORATORY OF DAVY AND FARADAY AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.
Moreover, it is a laboratory eminently calculated to excite the enthusiasm of anybody, being, in fact, the most famous laboratory known to chemical science. The workshop of Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Doctor Thomas Young, to say nothing of lesser and still famous men, it is a nest in which more great discoveries have been hatched than any other of its kind on earth. Here it was that Young conducted the experiments which gave us the undulatory theory of light. Here Davy, covering, nearly a hundred years ago, almost the whole field of chemistry and electricity, made clear those principles which science and applied science since his time have developed to the marvellous degrees of to-day. A little room leading to the right of the main laboratory was the scene of all Faraday’s experiments in magnetism, and a cellar on its south side is known to this day as “Davy’s Froggery,” from the fact that Davy kept in it hundreds of live frogs for use in his experiments. Professor Dewar, whose sense of the inspiration of his surroundings is clearly deep, dwells upon them with interest, and tells how on one occasion a barrel of live frogs, imported by Davy from France, burst at the docks, causing astonishment there and consternation in the laboratory when Davy learned of his loss. It was in this laboratory that Faraday first liquefied chlorine gas, sending thereupon that famously curt note to Dr. Paris, the biographer of Davy, in 1823:
“Dear Sir:—The oil you noticed yesterday turns out to be liquid chlorine.
“Yours faithfully,