Marvels of Scientific Invention Part 2

The task of watching the rocking to and fro of the spot of light was found to be too nerve-racking for the telegraph operators, and so Lord Kelvin improved upon his galvanometer in two ways. He first of all managed to give it greater turning-power, so that, actuated by the same current, the new instrument would work much more strongly than the older one. Then he utilised this added power to move a pen whereby the signals were recorded automatically upon a piece of paper. The new instrument is known as the Siphon Recorder.

The added power was obtained by turning the instrument inside out, as it were, making the coil the moving part and the permanent magnet the fixed part. This enabled him to employ a very powerful permanent magnet in place of the minute one made of watch-spring. The interaction of two magnets is the result of their combined strength, and that of the coil being limited by the strength of the minute current the only way to increase the combined power of the two was to subst.i.tute a large powerful magnet for the small magnetised watch-spring. This large magnet would, of course, have been too heavy to swing easily and therefore the positions had to be reversed.

So now we have two types of galvanometer, both due originally to the inventions of Lord Kelvin. For some purposes the Thomson type (his name was Thomson before he became Lord Kelvin) are still used, but in a slightly elaborated form. Its sensitiveness is such that a current of a thousandth of a micro-ampere will move the spot of light appreciably.

And when one comes to consider that a micro-ampere is a millionth part of an ampere this is perfectly astounding.

But there is a more wonderful story still to come, of an instrument which can detect a millionth of a micro-ampere, or one millionth of a millionth of an ampere. It is not generally known that we are all possessors of an electric generator in the form of the human heart, but it is so, and Professor Einthoven, of Leyden, wishing to investigate these currents from the heart, found himself in need of a galvanometer exceeding in sensitiveness anything then known. Even the tiny needles or coils with their minute mirrors have some weight and so possess in an appreciable degree the property of inertia, in virtue of which they are loath to start movement and, having started, are reluctant to stop. This inertia, it is easy to see, militates against the accurate recording of rapid variations in minute currents, so the energetic Professor set about devising a new galvanometer which should answer his purpose. This is known as the "String Galvanometer."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.-This shows the principle of this wonderful Galvanometer invented by Lord Kelvin in its latest form. Current enters at _a_, pa.s.ses round the coils, as shown by the arrows, and away at _b_.

A light rod, _c_, is suspended by the fine fibre, _d_, so that the eight little magnets hang in the centres of the coils--four in each. The current deflects these magnets and so turns the mirror, _m_, at the bottom of the rod. At _e_ are two large magnets which give the little ones the necessary tendency to keep at "zero."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.--Here we see the working parts of the "String Galvanometer," by which the beating of the heart can be registered electrically. The current flows down the fine silvered fibre, between the poles, _a_ and _b_, of a powerful magnet. As the current varies, the fibre bends more or less.]

The main body of the instrument is a large, powerful electro-magnet, in shape like a large pair of jaws nearly shut. Energised by a strong current, this magnet produces an exceedingly strong magnetic field in the small s.p.a.ce between the "teeth" as it were. In this s.p.a.ce there is stretched a fine thread of quartz which is almost perfectly elastic. It is a non-conductor, however, so it is covered with a fine coating of silver. Silver wire is sometimes used, but no way has yet been found of drawing any metallic wire so thin as the quartz fibre, which is sometimes as thin as two thousandths of a millimetre, or about a twelve-thousandth of an inch. A hundred pages of this book make up a thickness of about an inch, so that one leaf is about a fiftieth of an inch. Consequently the fibre in question could be multiplied 240 times before it became as stout as the paper on which these words are printed.

The current to be measured, then, is pa.s.sed through the stretched fibre and the interaction of the magnetic field by which the fibre is then surrounded, with the magnetic field in which it is immersed, causes it to be deflected to one side. Of course the deflection is exceedingly small in amount, and as it is undesirable to hamper its movements by the weight of a mirror, no matter how small, some other means of reading the instrument had to be devised. This is a microscope which is fixed to one of the jaws, through a fine hole in which the movements of the fibre can be viewed. Or what is often better still, a picture of the wire can be projected through the microscope on to a screen or on to a moving photographic plate or strip of photographic paper. In the latter case a permanent record is made of the changes in the flowing current.

An electric picture can thus be made of the working of a man's heart. He holds in his hands two metal handles or is in some other way connected to the two ends of the fibre by wires just as the handles of a shocking coil are connected to the ends of the coil. The faint currents caused by the beating of his heart are thus set down in the form of a wavy line.

Such a diagram is called a "cardiogram," and it seems that each of us has a particular form of cardiogram peculiar to himself, so that a man could almost be recognised and distinguished from his fellows by the electrical action of his heart.

The galvanometer has a near relative, the electrometer, the astounding delicacy of which renders it equally interesting. It is particularly valuable in certain important investigations as to the nature and construction of atoms.

The galvanometer, it will be remembered, measures minute currents; the electrometer measures minute pressures, particularly those of small electrically charged bodies.

Every conductor (and all things are conductors, more or less) can be given a charge of electricity. Any insulated wire, for example, if connected to a battery will become charged--current will flow into it and there remain stationary. And that is what we mean by a charge as opposed to a current.

Air compressed into a closed vessel is a charge. Air, however compressed, flowing along a pipe would be better described as a current.

Imagine one of those cylinders used for the conveyance of gas under pressure and suppose that we desire to find the pressure of the gas with which it is charged. We connect a pressure-gauge to it, and see what the finger of the gauge has to say. What happens is that gas from the cylinder flows into the little vessel which const.i.tutes the gauge and there records its own pressure.

And just the same applies with electrometers. Precisely as the pressure-gauge measures the pressure of air or gas in some vessel, so the electrometer measures the electrical pressure in a charged body.

Further, some of the charged bodies with which the student of physics is much concerned are far smaller than can be seen with the most powerful microscope. How wonderfully minute and delicate, therefore, must be the instrument which can be influenced by the tiny charge which so small a body can carry.

It will be interesting here to describe an experiment performed with an electrometer by Professor Rutherford, by which he determined how many molecules there are in a centimetre of gas, a number very important to know but very difficult to ascertain, since molecules are too small to be seen. This number, by the way, is known to science as "Avogadro's Constant."

Everyone has heard of radium, and knows that it is in a state which can best be described as a long-drawn-out explosion. It is always shooting off tiny particles. Night and day, year in and year out, it is firing off these exceedingly minute projectiles, of which there are two kinds, one of which appears to be atoms of helium.

Some years ago, when radium was being much talked about and the names of M. and Madame Curie were in everyone's mouth, little toys were sold, the invention, I believe, of Sir William Crookes, called spinthariscopes.

Each of these consisted of a short bra.s.s tube with a small lens in one end. Looking through the lens in a dark room, one could see little splashes of light on the walls of the tube. Those splashes were caused by a tiny speck of radium in the middle of the tube, the helium atoms from which, by bombarding the inner surface of the tube, produced the sparks.

Now if we can count those splashes we can tell how many atoms of helium are being given off per minute. And if then we reckon how many minutes it takes to acc.u.mulate a cubic centimetre of helium we can easily reckon how many atoms go to the cubic centimetre. But the difficulty is to count them.

So the learned Professor called in the aid of the electrometer. He could not count all the atoms shot off, so he put the piece of radium at one end of a tube and an electrometer at the other. Every now and then an atom shot right through the tube and out at the farther end. And since each of these atoms from radium is charged with electricity, each as it emerged operated the electrometer. By simply watching the twitching of the instrument, therefore, it was possible to count how many atoms shot through the tube--one atom one twitch. And from the size and position of the tube it was possible to reckon what proportion of the whole number shot off would pa.s.s that way.

The result of the experiment showed that there are in a cubic centimetre of helium a number of atoms represented by 256 followed by seventeen noughts. And as helium is one of the few substances in which the molecule is formed of but one atom, that is also the number of molecules.

And now consider this, please. A cubic centimetre is about the size of a boy's marble. That contains the vast number of molecules just mentioned.

And the electrometer was able to detect the presence of those _one at a time_. Need one add another word as to the inconceivable delicacy of the instrument.

In its simplest form the electrometer is called the "electroscope." Two strips of gold-leaf are suspended by their ends under a gla.s.s or metal shade. As they hang normally they are in close proximity. Their upper ends are, in fact, in contact and are attached to a small vertical conductor. A charge imparted to the small conductor will pa.s.s down into the leaves, and since it will charge them both they will repel each other so that their lower ends will swing apart. Such an instrument is very delicate, but because of the extreme thinness of the leaves it is very difficult to read accurately the amount of their movement and so to determine the charge which has been given to them.

In a more recent improvement, therefore, only one strip of gold-leaf is used, the place of the other being taken by a copper strip. The whole of the movement is thus in the single gold-leaf, as the copper strip is comparatively stiff, and it is possible to arrange for the movement of this one piece of gold-leaf to be measured by a microscope.

The other princ.i.p.al kind of electrometer we owe, as we do the galvanometers, to the wonderful ingenuity of Lord Kelvin. In this the moving part is a strip of thin aluminium, which is suspended in a horizontal position by means, generally, of a fine quartz fibre. Since it is necessary that this fibre should be a conductor, which quartz is not, it is electro-plated with silver. Thus a charge communicated to the upper end of the fibre, where it is attached to the case, pa.s.ses down to the aluminium "needle," as it is called. Now the needle is free to swing to and fro, with a rotating motion, between two metal plates carefully insulated. Each plate is cut into four quadrants, the opposite ones being electrically connected, while all are insulated from their nearest neighbours. One set of quadrants is charged positively, and one set negatively, by a battery, but these charges have no effect upon the needle until it is itself charged. As soon as that occurs, however, they pull it round, and the amount of its movement indicates the amount of the charge upon the needle, and therefore the pressure existing upon the charged body to which it is connected. The direction of its movement shows, moreover, whether the charge be positive or negative.

A little mirror is attached to the needle, so that its slightest motion is revealed by the movement of a spot of light, as in the case of the mirror galvanometers. Instruments such as these are called "Quadrant Electrometers."

My readers will remember, too, the "String Galvanometer" already mentioned. The same idea has been adapted to this purpose. A fine fibre is stretched between two charged conductors while the fibre is itself connected to the body whose charge is being measured. The charge which it derives from the body causes it to be deflected, which deflection is measured by a microscope.

In all cases of transmission of electricity over long distances for lighting or power purposes the currents are "alternating." They flow first one way and then the other, reversing perhaps twenty times a second, or it may be two hundred, or even more times in that short period. Some electric railways are worked with alternating current, and it is used for lighting quite as much as direct current and is equally satisfactory.

In wireless telegraphy it is essential. In that case, however, the reversals may take place _millions_ of times per second. Consequently, to distinguish the comparatively slowly changing currents of a "frequency" or "periodicity" of a few hundreds per second from these much more rapid ones, the latter are more often spoken of as electrical oscillations. And these alternating and oscillating currents need to be measured just as the direct currents do. Yet in many cases the same instruments will not answer. There has therefore grown up a cla.s.s of wonderful measuring instruments specially designed for this purpose, by which not only does the station engineer know what his alternating current dynamos are doing, but the wireless operator can tell what is happening in his apparatus, the investigator can probe the subtleties of the currents which he is working with, and apparatus for all purposes can be designed and worked with a system and reason which would be impossible but for the possibility of being able to measure the behaviour of the subtle current under all conditions.

One trouble in connection with measuring these alternating currents is that they are very reluctant to pa.s.s through a coil.

One method by which this difficulty can be overcome has been mentioned incidentally already. I refer to the heating of a wire through which current is pa.s.sing. This is just the same whether the current be alternating or direct.

One of the simplest instruments of this cla.s.s has been appropriated by the Germans, who have named it the "Reiss Electrical Thermometer,"

although it was really invented nearly a century ago by Sir William Snow Harris. It consists of a gla.s.s bulb on one end of a gla.s.s tube. The current is pa.s.sed through a fine wire inside this bulb, and as the wire becomes heated it expands the air inside the bulb. This expansion moves a little globule of mercury which lies in the tube, and which forms the pointer or indicator by which the instrument is read. As the temperature of the wire rises the mercury is forced away from the bulb, as the temperature falls it returns. And as the temperature is varied by the pa.s.sage of the current, so the movement of the mercury is a measure of the current.

Another way is to employ a "Rectifier." This is a conductor which has the peculiar property of allowing current to pa.s.s one way but not the other. It thus eliminates every alternate current and changes the alternating current into a series of intermittent currents all in the same direction. Rectified current is thus hardly described by the term continuous, but still it is "continuous current" in the sense that the flow is always in the same direction, and so it can be measured by the ordinary continuous current instruments. The difficulty about it is that there is some doubt as to the relation between the quant.i.ty of rectified current which the galvanometer registers and the quant.i.ty of alternating current, which after all is the quant.i.ty which is really to be measured.

How the rectification is accomplished will be referred to again in the chapter on Wireless Telegraphy.

But to return to the thermo-galvanometers, as those are termed which ascertain the strength of a current by the heat which it produces, the simple little contrivance of Sir William Snow Harris has more elaborate successors, of which perhaps the most interesting are those a.s.sociated with the name of Mr W. Duddell, who has made the subject largely his own. Besides their interest as wonderfully delicate measuring instruments, these have an added interest, since they introduce us to another strange phenomenon in electricity. We have just noted the fact that electricity causes heat. Now we shall see the exact opposite, in which heat produces electrical pressure and current. And the feature of Mr Duddell's instruments is the way in which these two things are combined. By a roundabout but very effective way he rectifies the current to be measured, for he first converts some of the alternating current into heat and then converts that heat into continuous current.

If two pieces of dissimilar metals be connected together by their ends, so as to form a circuit, and one of the joints be heated, an electrical pressure will be generated which will cause a current to flow round the circuit. The direction in which it will flow will depend upon the metals employed. The amount of the pressure will also depend upon the metals used, combined with the temperature of the junctions. With any given pair of metals, however, the force, and therefore the volume of current, will vary as the temperature. Really it will be the difference in temperature between the hot junction and the cold junction, but if we so arrange things that the cold junction shall always remain about the same, the current which flows will vary as the temperature of the hot one. The volume of that current will therefore be a measure of the temperature. Such an arrangement is known as a thermo-couple, and is becoming of great use in many manufacturing processes as a means of measuring temperatures.

In the Duddell Thermo-galvanometers, therefore, the alternating current is first led to a "heater" consisting of fine platinised quartz fibre or thin metal wires. Just above the heater there hangs a thermo-couple, consisting of two little bars, one of bis.m.u.th and the other of antimony.

These two are connected together at their lower end, where they nearly touch the heater, but their upper ends are kept a little apart, being joined, however, by a loop formed of silver strip. This arrangement will be quite clear from the accompanying sketch, and it will be observed that the loop is so shaped that the whole thing can be easily suspended by a delicate fibre which will permit it to swing easily, like the coil in a mirror galvanometer.

It is indeed a swinging coil of a galvanometer formed with a single turn instead of the many turns usual in the ordinary instruments, and it will be noticed from the sketch that there is a mirror fixed just above the top of the loop.

This coil, then, with the thermo-couple at its lower extremity, is hung between the ends of a powerful magnet much as the fibre of the Einthoven Galvanometer is situated. The alternating current to be measured comes along through the heater. The heater rises in temperature. That warms the lower end of the thermo-couple. Instantly a steady, continuous current begins to circulate round the silver strip which forms the coil, and that, acting just as the current does in the ordinary galvanometer, causes the coil to swing round more or less, which movement is indicated by the spot of light from the mirror. A current as small as twenty micro-amperes (or twenty millionths of an ampere) can be measured in this way.

Mr Duddell has also perfected a wonderful instrument called an Oscillograph, for the strange purpose of making actual pictures of the rise and fall in volume of current in alternating circuits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3.--The "Duddell" Thermo-galvanometer.

In this remarkable instrument _alternating_ current enters at _a_, pa.s.ses through the fine wire and leaves at _b_. In doing this it heats the wire, which in turn heats the lower end of the bis.m.u.th and antimony bars. This generates _continuous_ current, which circulates through the loop of silver wire, _c_, which, since it hangs between the poles, _d_ and _e_, of a magnet, is thereby turned more or less. The amount of the turning indicates the strength of the _alternating_ current.]

To realise the almost miraculous delicacy of these wonderful instruments we need first of all to construct a mental picture of what takes place in a circuit through which alternating current is pa.s.sing. The current begins to flow: it gradually increases in volume until it reaches its maximum: then it begins to die away until it becomes nil: then it begins to grow in the opposite direction, increases to its maximum and dies away once more. That cycle of events occurs over and over again at the rate it may be of hundreds of times per second. Now for the actual efficient operation of electrical machinery working on alternating current it is very necessary to know exactly how those changes take place--do they occur gradually, the current growing and increasing in volume regularly and steadily, or irregularly in a jumpy manner?

Engineers have a great fancy for setting out such changes in the form of diagrams, in which case the alternations are represented by a wavy line, and it is of much importance to obtain an actual diagram showing not what the changes should be according to theory, but what they really are in practice. It is then possible to see whether the "wave-form" of the current is what it ought to be.

Once again we must turn our thoughts back to the string galvanometer. In that case, it will be remembered, there is a conducting fibre pa.s.sing between the ends or poles of a powerful magnet, the result of which arrangement is that as the current pa.s.ses through the fibre it is bent by the action of the magnetic forces produced around it. If the current pa.s.s one way, downwards let us say, the fibre will be bent one way, while if it pa.s.s upwards it will be bent the opposite way. Suppose then that we have two fibres instead of one, and that we send the current up one and down the other. One will be bent inwards and the other outwards.

Then suppose that we fix a little mirror to the centre of the fibres, one side of it being attached to one fibre and the other to the other.

As one fibre advances and the other recedes the mirror will be turned more or less. Consequently, as the current flowing in the fibres increases or decreases, or changes in direction, the mirror will be slewed round more or less in one direction or the other.

The spot of light thrown by the mirror will then dance from side to side with every variation, and if it be made to fall upon a rapidly moving strip of photograph paper a wavy line will be drawn upon the paper which will faithfully represent the changes in the current.