Abstract
THE death of Sir William Barrett, F.R.S., on May 26, at eighty-one years of age, removes one who dates back to a period in physics long antecedent to all the recent advances—the period of Wheatstone and Balfour Stewart and Tyndall. He never pretended to follow the recondite mathematical and dynamical investigations of last century, typified by the great names of Stokes and Thomson and Tait. The original discoveries in physics which he himself made concerned such things as—sensitive flames, which he first observed while working in the 'sixties on sound in Tyndall's laboratory at the Royal Institution; some alloys of iron, especially a useful one called stalloy, which he claimed to have announced in 1899; and the odd behaviour of iron at or near the magnetic critical point. In this last phenomenon, a hot iron wire under longitudinal strain not only suddenly expands but also rises in temperature, giving a momentary glow which he called calorescence, since he regarded it as an example of a rise in the refrangibility of emitted radiation—presumably by molecular or atomic rearrangement—in contrast to the lowering of refrangibility (or what we now call frequency) so well elaborated by Sir G. G. Stokes under the name fluorescence.
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LODGE, O. Sir William Fletcher Barrett, F.R.S. Nature 115, 880–881 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/115880a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/115880a0