Abstract
IT is not often that Faraday committed an oversight; but such I think he must have done in his well-known paper concerning the existence of a limit to vaporisation. (“Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics,” p. 119.*) Faraday showed experimentally, that mercury emitted no appreciable vapour below 20° F. and accounted for this on the ground that “the elastic force of any vapour which the mercury could have produced at that temperature, was less than the force of gravity upon it and that, consequently, the mercury was then perfectly fixed.” He adds, “I think we can hardly doubt that such is the case, at common temperatures, with respect to silver and with all bodies which bear a high temperature without appreciable loss by volatilisation, as platina, gold, iron, nickel, silica, alumina, charcoal, &c., and that, consequently, at common temperatures, no portion of vapour rises from these bodies or surrounds them.”
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An Oversight by Faraday. Nature 1, 384 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/001384a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001384a0
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