Pursuing his experiments with static electricity, Dr. Morton soon
found that better results could be obtained by the use of Leyden jars
influenced by the Holtz machine, and discharging into a vacuum bulb,
as shown in the illustration on this page. This arrangement of the
apparatus has the advantage of making it much easier to regulate the
electric supply and to modify its intensity, and Dr. Morton finds that
in this way large vacuum tubes, perhaps twenty inches in diameter,
may be excited to the point of doing practical work without danger of
breaking the glass walls. But certain precautions are necessary. When
he uses tin-foil electrodes on the outside of the bulb, he protects
the tin-foil edges, and, what is more essential, uses extremely small
Leyden jars and a short spark gap between the poles of the discharging
rods. The philosophy of this is, that the smaller the jars, the
greater their number of oscillations per second (easily fifteen
million, according to Dr. Lodge's computations), the shorter the wave
length, and, therefore, the greater the intensity of effects.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF FAMILIAR ARTICLES UNDER THE ROeNTGEN RAYS.
From a photograph by Professor Arthur W. Wright of Yale College, taken
through an ebonite plate-holder with fifty-five minutes exposure.
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