Pembroke College, Cambridge | Jan 7th 1853
My dear Sir,
I found your letter on my return to Cambridge this evening. As you seem to be disengaged in the early part of next week, I propose to go to Town on Monday1, so as to be ready to try experiments on Monday evening. Please to leave word with the Porter, or with your assistant, what hour you would like to begin. It is a matter of perfect indifference to me.
By way of fixing on something, I would propose on Monday evening to try the effects of different flames, especially on sulphur burning in oxygen, the effect of which, from your account2, must be very powerful. I should be glad also to try the experiment you mentioned respecting the light given by the explosion of oxygen and hydrogen in a glass vessel, and some others which that suggested to me.
The glass vessel which I ordered is destined to hold a very weak solution of chromate or bichromate of potash. I am not sure which will answer best, but I am inclined to think the chromate. It is no consequence whether the salt be or be not chemically pure.
I should be glad to have some Canton’s3 phosphorous4. I have got some here, but as I made it myself merely in my fire I am afraid it may not be good.
If there be an Argand lamp at the R.I. I should be glad to repeat the experiment Draper’s which I have referred to at p.547 of my paper l.10 from the bottom5. According to Becquerel, the rays of low refrangibility cause Canton’s phosphorus if previously excited by rays of high refrangibility to give out more quickly than it otherwise would the light which it is capable of giving out6. It strikes me as possible that the phosphorous with which Draper worked when he obtained this result may have been previously excited.
I dare say the experiments I have mentioned, and some things I should like to show you, (such as the absorption-bands of permanganate of potash mentioned in Note D of my paper7) will afford work enough for one evening without the electrifying machine.
Art. 224 of my paper8 will explain what I wanted with a revolving mirror. The experiment could be performed in any place where there are these two things, a revolving mirror apparatus, and an electrifying machine[.] If Prof. Wheatstone will kindly lend his apparatus, or else undertake the experiment himself, it might be performed at his house or at King’s College as might be convenient.
Yours very truly | G.G. Stokes
BECQUEREL, Alexandre-Edmond (1847): “Note sur la phosphorescence produite par insolation”, Comptes Rendus, 27: 632-3.
CANTON, John (1768): “An Easy Method of Making a Phosphorous That Will Imbibe and Emit Light, Like the Bolognian Stone. With Experiments and Observations”, Phil. Trans., 58: 336-44.
DRAPER, John William (1845): “Account of a remarkable difference between the Rays of Incandescent Lime and those emitted by an Electric Spark”, Phil. Mag., 27: 435-7.
JAMES, Frank A.J.L. (1985): “'The Optical Mode of Investigation': Light and Matter in Faraday's Natural Philosophy” in Gooding and James (1985), 137-61.
STOKES, George Gabriel (1852): “On the Change of Refrangibility of Light”, Phil. Trans., 142: 463-562.
STOKES, George Gabriel (1853): “On the Change of Refrangibility of Light, and the exhibition thereby of the Chemical Rays”, Proc. Roy. Inst., 1: 259-64.
Please cite as “Faraday2616,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday2616