Abstract
THIS lecture is on reminiscences connected with the Royal Institution, so that accounts of quite recent discoveries would not be within its scope. There is one subject, however, which is now attracting a good deal of attention—heavy hydrogen—which satisfies both conditions; it is a teminiscence and it is connected with the Royal Institution. In 1911 I gave a Friday evening discourse “On a New Method of Chemical Analysis”. By this method each kind of gaseous particle in a vessel through which an electric discharge is passing produces its own parabolic curve on a photographic plate. Thus if the vessel contained a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, there would be six parabolas corresponding to the atoms and molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen respectively, along with others due to each of the compounds formed by these elements. The mass of the particle which produces any parabola can be determined from the position of the parabola.
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THOMSON, J. Heavy Hydrogen*. Nature 133, 280–281 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133280a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133280a0