Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being a Course of Twelve Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the Season of 1862

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D. Appleton & Company, 1864 - Heat - 480 pages
 

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Page 70 - It is hardly necessary to add, that any thing which any insulated body, or system of bodies, can continue to furnish without limitation, cannot possibly be a material substance...
Page 68 - Fahrenheit's thermometer — could have been furnished by so inconsiderable a quantity of metallic dust, and this merely in consequence of a change in its capacity for heat'?
Page 25 - ACTUALLY BOILED ! It would be difficult to describe the surprise and astonishment expressed in the countenances of the bystanders, on seeing so large a quantity of cold water heated, and actually made to boil, without any fire.
Page 67 - Heat is a motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife upon the smaller particles of bodies. But the expansion is thus modified: while it expands all ways, it has at the same time an inclination upwards. And the struggle in the particles is modified also: it is not sluggish, but hurried and with violence.
Page 110 - The immediate cause of the phenomena of heat then is motion, and the laws of its communication are precisely the same, as the laws of the communication of motion.
Page 70 - By meditating on the results of all these experiments we are naturally brought to that great question which has so often been the subject of speculation among philosophers, namely, What is heat — is there any such thing as an igneous fluid? Is there...
Page 111 - ... the particles move round their own axes, and separate from each other, penetrating in right lines through space. Temperature may be conceived to depend upon the velocities of the vibrations; increase of capacity on the motion being performed in greater space; and the diminution of temperature, during the conversion of solids into fluids or gases, may be explained on the idea of the loss of vibratory motion, in consequence of the revolution of particles round their axes, at the moment when the...
Page 111 - ... and elastic fluids, besides the vibratory motion, which must be conceived greatest in the last, the particles have a motion round their own axes with different velocities, the particles of elastic fluids moving with the greatest quickness ;. and that in ethereal substances the particles move round their own axes, and separate from each other, penetrating in right lines through space.
Page 111 - Since all matter may be made to fill a smaller space by cooling, it is evident that the particles of matter must haye space between them ; and since every body can communicate the power of expansion to a body of a lower temperature — that is, can give an expansive motion to its particles — it is a probable inference that its own particles are possessed of motion ; but as there is no change in the position of its parts, as long as its temperature is uniform, the motion, if it...
Page 67 - Being engaged lately in superintending the boring of cannon in the workshops of the military arsenal at Munich, I was struck with the very considerable degree of Heat which a brass gun acquires in a short time in being bored, and with the still more intense Heat (much greater than that of boiling water, as I found by experiment) of the metallic chips separated from it by the borer.

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