The Life and Letters of Faraday

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. Later Period Of Electrical Research?Discovery Of The 'magnetisation Of Light'?The Magnetic State Of All Matter Atmospheric Magnetism. The second period of Faraday's electrical work lasted 1845. ten years. The discoveries he made were published in JEr.53-4. the ' Philosophical Transactions.'...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. Later Period Of Electrical Research?Discovery Of The 'magnetisation Of Light'?The Magnetic State Of All Matter Atmospheric Magnetism. The second period of Faraday's electrical work lasted 1845. ten years. The discoveries he made were published in JEr.53-4. the ' Philosophical Transactions.' They constitute from the nineteenth to the thirtieth series of his 'Experimental Researches in Electricity.' ' The magnetisation of light, ' ' the magnetic condition of all matter, ' and ' atmospheric magnetism, ' were among the discoveries made during this period. Faraday's reputation at this time was so great that it added to the renown with which the publication of each new discovery was received; but great as the discoveries were, they will not at the present time rank with the three great discoveries of ' magneto-electricity, ' ' voltaic induction, ' and ' definite electro-chemical decomposition, ' which made the glory of the earlier period of the ' Researches in Electricity.' In the beginning of 1845 Faraday worked on the condensation of gases; on August 30 he began to experiment on polarised light and electrolytes, a subject which in 1833 had given 'no result.' After three days he worked with common electricity, trying glass, heavy optical glass, quartz, Iceland spa. Still he 1845. got no effect on the polarised ray. On September 13 jEr.53-54. he writes: ' To-day worked with lines of magnetic force, passing them across different bodies transparent in different directions, and at the same time passing a polarised ray of light through them, and afterwards examining the ray by a Nichol's eye-piece or other means. Air, flint-glass, rock-crystal, calcareous spa, were examined, but without effect. ' Heavy glass was experimented with. It gave no effects when the sam