Abstract
THE recent letters in NATURE from Prof. W. Schmidt and Prof. H. Stansfield, describing their observations of a capillary wave on the surface of water, are a reminder that important published observations may be forgotten for many years. Prof. Stansfield now finds that this phenomenon was described by Osborne Reynolds in 1881. Reynolds produced the wave by dropping oil on water, and also observed it in the open air, perhaps when he was fishing, as he says it looks like a line of gut floating on a river, where the water eddies up to the surface in deep pools. About forty years later, there was fresh activity in the study of moving films. In September, 1921, the late Mr. E. Edser quoted Reynolds's paper at a meeting of the Faraday Society, and described experiments showing that the moving film of oil sets in motion a thin layer of water beneath it. Five years before, in Toronto, Prof. J. Satterly had noticed a ‘ripple’ which moves up a glass tube in advance of the liquid meniscus, when the tube is being filled from below; this and other effects similar to the Reynolds ridge were under investigation there. Five years later, Burdon of Adelaide published a photograph of oil spreading on the surface of water, clearly showing the Reynolds ridge in advance of the visible oil film; and in the same year, 1926, Edser included this photograph and a discussion of the ridge in Appendix IV of his “General Physics for Students”. When the rising generation of physicists see the Reynolds ridge, they should recognize it at once as an old friend.
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The Osborne Reynolds Ridge. Nature 138, 20 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138020b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138020b0