Some Wonderful Figures

1895

Figures on the light and heat of the sun are the most startling that can possibly be presented. The astronomers measure the amount of heat and light emitted by the sun by estimating that the earth intercepts about the two billion three hundred millionth part of it. Thus it is found that in every second of time the sun emits as much heat as would result from the sudden combustion of 11,600,000,000,000 tons of pure coal! It may be interesting to the reader to know that each portion of the sun's surface as large as this earth emits as much heat per second as would result from the combustion of 1,000,000,000 tons of the best anthracite fuel. — St. Louis Republic.


An Awkward Compliment

Lady — The feet of your women are compressed!
Japanese Attache — Beg your pardon, madame, that is a Chinese custom. As for ourselves, we allow the feet of our women to attain their natural dimensions without for a moment pretending that they can come up to the size of yours, madame. — Progres Illustre.


Feasts

The fixed Christian. feasts are All Saints, Nov. 1; All Souls, Nov. 2; Candlemas, Feb. 2; Christmas, Dec. 25; Circumcision, Jan. 1; Epiphany, Jan. 6; Innocents, Dec. 28.

A Study of The Sun

1895

A FASCINATING RECREATION WHICH ANY ONE MAY ENJOY.

How It May Be Observed Without Danger. A Method of Getting a Perfectly Pure Beam For Inspection — A Lesson In Astronomy Couched In Simple Terms.

Every day a royal presence, attended by numerous unseen courtiers, sweeps across the sky. The sun looks us so boldly in the face that we are compelled to veil ourselves from his accursing gaze. Let us commence our now studies by contemplating his attractiveness.

A piece of well smoked glass will give us good service. If this be covered with another piece, with strips of paper at the edges to separate them and prevent rubbing, and other mucilaged strips to bind the outer edges, we shall have a respectable and lasting astronomical instrument.

The eye may now examine the dazzling orb without danger, and it will discover a disk which is apparently no larger than that of the full moon, but the fact that the sun is about 400 times farther away accounts for the resemblance in size. But the disk is not all of the immense world, for a very important envelope of vast dimensions is invisible except to special instruments. The limb of the sun is seen to be not quite so bright as the central portions, because the light from it has to penetrate a greater depth of atmosphere.

Occasionally we see a "spot" upon the solar surface, in which case it must be very large, but if we are fortunate enough to have access to even a small spyglass we shall many times see spots. There are years when the spots are very numerous (the writer counted 168 one day and more than 300 on a day in 1893), and years when none is seen for months, and this appears to be governed by a "period" of about 11 years.

If we use a telescope with our smoked glass, the spectacle will be curiously interesting, for the object glass — a very large eye — gathers many rays of light and bends them to a focus, producing a magnified image which is yet more enlarged by the eyepiece, which is a microscope. Now, the very grain of the sun, so to speak, is visible, the surface being completely flecked with gray white matter, while here and there huge masses of white protrude. These latter are called faculae and are usually associated with the spots which are depressions in the surface — deep, dark cavities, but dark only as contrasted with the shining regions, for they are brighter than the calcium light. Very recently the writer measured a large group and found that it occupied an area of more than 100,000 miles in length and about three-fourths as wide, into which could be cast 100 earths without crowding them. Still larger groups have sometimes been noticed. Watching the spots from day to day reveals the time of revolution of the sun upon its axis, about 25 days, which means that one day on the sun is as long as 25 of ours.

As yet the sun has not yielded the secret of its composition, and the telescope, unaided, is inadequate to solve the mystery. Perhaps in childhood we beguiled hours of church service, which were a trifle wearisome to little ones, by noticing the play of color in the "lusters" which hung in profusion from the old fashioned lamps. How little we dreamed that the sun was whispering through this simple medium intelligible messages of very high importance, for this three faced form of glass is called a prism, the change of direction of objects viewed through it being due to the bending (refraction) of the rays of light passing through it, and the color fringe along the edges of the images the primary rays of which white light is composed, which is easily proved by passing the colored rays through another prism, when they form a beam of white light once more.

The same color band, or spectrum, is shown by a grating of parallel wires strung in a frame, or by a close grained feather, or even by the eyelashes when the eye is half closed.

But we can easily improve upon these primitive instruments by employing a series of prisms of fine construction or a grating produced by ruling lines with a diamond upon a piece of perfectly flat and highly polished speculum metal.

To get a perfectly pure beam for inspection we let the telescopic image of the sun fall upon a delicate slit in a metal plate, which is in the focus of the object glass of a little telescope, whose duty it is to make parallel the rays to be examined, and which sends them through the series of prisms referred to or causes them to fall upon a grating. In either case they are viewed by another little telescope, and the beam of sunlight tells its story in a magnificent spectrum, far exceeding the rarest touches of world renowned artists.

Now for the precious secret! The beautiful color band is threaded with thousands of slender dark lines, which correspond with the bright lines, which are the sign manual of metals in a glowing state, and we need only to put a pinch of salt in the flame of a candle and let the light fall alongside the sun's image on the slit, when there will be two spectra, side by side, and the two bright yellow lines of sodium will exactly coincide with two black lines in the orange of the solar spectrum, and the crowning proof appears when the calcium light is permitted to shine through the candle flame, instantly turning the bright lines to dark ones. So with the lines of other metals.

We have learned from the sun's own messages, after a journey of 93,000,000 miles, that it is a gaseous body; that many of the metals of earth are vaporized in its awful temperature, and that the surface is probably a shell of luminous clouds surrounded by an "atmosphere" of gases thousands of miles deep, out of which spurt for hundreds of thousands of miles, with a speed in contrast with which the movement of whirlwinds on earth is a dead calm, jets of flaming hydrogen intermingled with the metallic vapors, which, becoming cooled by exposure to the cold of space, fall upon the surface and cause the depressions known as spots. — Philadelphia Ledger.

Plan of the Universe So Vast It Baffles Human Comprehension

1920

Orion
By S. F. Maxwell
[Copyright, 1920, by W. D. Boyce Co.]

What is the plan of the universe? Time and space go on and on forever, but there is a limit to the stars, in this little corner of the sky, at least.

The stellar universe is vast almost beyond comprehension. We think the 92,000,000 miles to the sun is an immense distance, yet light crosses it in eight minutes. The distance light goes in a year is the ordinary unit for stellar distances, yet in measuring the size of the universe it is entirely too small.

Example in Reduced Proportions.

Here is an example of the proportions of outer space. Let the earth's orbit be represented by a silver dime. Then Mars is one inch away, Jupiter 5 inches, Saturn eight inches, Uranus seventeen inches and Neptune thirty inches. This ends the sun's little family of planets. The nearest star on this scale is three miles away, the next is seven, the next nine, and most of the others are hundreds and thousands Of miles away.

Now multiply this scale enough to make the dime 186,000,000 miles in diameter, and you have a fair idea of the size of the universe. We can see the stars clearly over such enormous expanses of space because they are exceedingly bright and also because an absolute vacuum exists between, with nothing to stop their speeding light waves.

There are forces permeating all this great expanse, chief of which is gravity. It is nowhere as strong as the gravity we experience on the surface of the earth, but as there is no force adequate to counteract it, it swings the stars about just as the sun swings its planets.

There are two streams of stars in the sky, rushing along like motes in a sunbeam. The two streams mix at times, and mingle together without apparently suffering in the least. Stars are to a great extent independent of their nearest neighbors. There are many close clusters that move from birth to death without the component parts falling together at all.

Streams of Moving Stars.

Astronomers, watching the stars of the sky moving in great streams, were much impressed by the amount of force necessary to hold so great a bulk of stars together. Left to themselves they could go on and on forever, and the universe would eventually disintegrate. Nothing like this seems to be taking place. The source of energy remained a mystery until it was discovered that the Orion stars did not partake of the general motion. They alone, of all the stars in the sky, stand still, and all the others wheel around them.

Orion is a gigantic constellation, and its suns are all huge, heavy bodies, whose tremendous pull of gravity is felt in every part of the celestial vault.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 9.

Cooling of the Earth

1914

The application of Stefan's law to the calculation of the mean temperature of the earth, at a given latitude, shows that at the latitude of 80 degrees, the temperature was in the neighborhood of 90 degrees Cent., when the sun's radius was about one and a half times its present dimensions, i.e., about two million years ago. Thus it would appear that life commenced on the earth in the vicinity of the poles. The same reasoning leads us to the conclusion that in less than two million years, when the sun's radius will be reduced by one-tenth of its present value, the temperature on the earth will have fallen below 0 degree, even at the equator. — Scientific American.

The Sun's Heat

The sun is hot enough to melt, on its surface, an envelope of ice.

—The Bismarck Tribune, Bismarck, ND, July 6, 1920, p. 2.

Wet and Dry Moons

1910

There is an old superstition, which dies hard, that the position of the horns of the new moon tells what the weather will be; if the horns of the crescent are on the same level, it will hold water, and hence it is a dry moon; but if it is tipped up, then the water will run out, and it is a wet moon.

One thing has helped keep this belief alive; the moon is "dry" in the part of the spring that is usually fair, while it is "wet" during the season of autumn rains.

If this were a sure sign of the weather we could have our predictions years in advance, for an astronomer can predict the exact position of the moon at any time in the future.

The cause for the different positions of the crescent is simple: The moon is south of the sun in the autumn and north of it in spring. The crescent is found by the light of the sun falling on the moon, and the horns are naturally in a line perpendicular to the direction of the sun from the moon.

That is all there is to it.

Harvesting the Sun

1896

When we sit in front of a coal fire and enjoy its generous warmth, do we realize that the heat and light of the burning coal are really sunshine that has been stored up for ages? Such is the fact. Centuries ago the sun shone on the earth, the plants and trees grew, fell, and grew again; they were covered by geologic deposits, and acted upon by great heat and pressure, until in the course of years and ages these broad layers of organic matter were transformed into coal. The coal thus represents the work done by the sunshine years ago, and when it is burned the imprisoned solar energy is loosened again.

Our system of power production depends upon this presence of energy. But coal is a wasteful source of energy. Even the best engines do not utilize over 10 per cent of the calculated energy of the heat of coal. And, besides this it is an inconvenient thing in many ways; it has to be mined, freighted and stored. Can we not find some more economical way of using the sun's energy?

During the last few years the great progress in electrical science has enabled man to utilize the solar heat in a thriftier way. During its day's work the sun draws up a large amount of water from the oceans and damp earth. By the action of its rays plant life flourishes, and plants draw from the ground and evaporate into the air large amounts of water. Thus an oak tree of average size, with seven hundred thousand leaves, lifts from the earth into the air about one hundred and twenty-three tons of water during the five months it displays its foliage. This evaporated water, sooner or later, falls as rain, and by the action of gravity begins to flow downward. Thus the great rivers are fed. Round and round incessantly goes the water lifted by the tireless sun to fall when deserted by him, and again to fall and run seaward as long as it may exist upon this earth.


Peculiar to the Locality

Some interesting discoveries have recently been made about animal life on the Hawaiian Islands. It appears that all the land and fresh water shells are peculiar to the locality. Nor is that all. Fifty-seven out of the seventy-eight species of birds, and seven hundred out of the one thousand species of insects do not exist in any other portion of the globe.

Time-Telling Inventions

1914

It seems that the invention of clocks and watches was not the fruit of a single discovery, but was really a slow growth, side by side with many other advances in civilization, and of course the earliest clocks and instruments were sun dials.

The invention of the sun dial is generally attributed to a Grecian astronomer who died about 547 B. C.

The dial was followed by the hourglass, and this by the water clock, which marked time by the escape of water through an orifice. These were introduced into Rome about 158 B. C., but are believed to have been in use in Chaldea and Egypt for a hundred years previous to that date.


Ants Build Skyscrapers

West African anthills are veritable giants, frequently standing 40 feet high, says the Wide World.

These anthills are shaped something like a sugar loaf and are divided into hundreds of tiny rooms. They have, needless to say, myriads of inhabitants and these are all busily occupied in various ways, forming tunnels, making roads, gathering food and watching over the eggs and youngsters.

The natives are afraid to touch these hills, except from a distance, with firearms. The ants often make their strongholds around trees, and they are built very solidly, with sides sometimes 20 inches thick.

The inside is hollow, and at the top there is a sort of attic. The "royal cell," where the queen ant lives, is always found on the ground floor. This good lady is a prisoner, but is carefully fed by her busy subjects, the eggs she lays being immediately carried away and deposited in "rooms" set apart for the purpose.

Old Style and New Style Calendars

1874

When the calendar of Julius Caesar was reformed under Pope Gregory XIII, in 1582, by a brief it was ordered that October 5th should be called October 15th. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar in England took place September, 1752, when the 3rd of the month was called the 14th. To change Old Style to New add 11 days. George Washington was born Feb. 11, 1732, O.S., but adding the 11 days, we celebrate the 22nd in honor of his birth. If the revolution of the earth around the sun occupied exactly 365¼ days, the calendar would never need correction. As that is about 11 minutes longer than the real period, we add a day every four years to February, omitting it in 1700, 1800, and 1900.


A Solemn Thought

Ten thousand human beings set forth together on their journey. After ten years one-third at least have disappeared. At the middle point of the common measure of life but half are still upon the road. Faster and faster, as the ranks grow thinner, they that remain till now become weary and lie down to rest no more. At threescore and ten a band of some four hundred still struggle on. At ninety these have been reduced to a handful of thirty trembling patriarchs. Year after year they fall in diminishing numbers. One lingers, perhaps, a lonely marvel, till the century is over. We look again and the work of death is finished.

Nature's Secrets — Possibilities of Solar Power

1920

Man gets to feeling pretty smart at times, but nature still has a great deal to teach him if she only would, says the Ohio State Journal. A scientist in the employ of the National Electric Lamp Association at its great plant in Cleveland devoted the entire season last year to studying the lightning bug in the effort to find out how that interesting creature makes light without heat. He failed to discover the secret, as had many another scientist before him.

The potential power which falls on the decks of a battleship in the sunshine of an August day, if it could be harnessed and utilized, would drive the ship vastly faster and farther in a day's journey than its great engines can drive it. The problem of harnessing presents, thus far, the insurmountable difficulty. When that is solved, as probably it will be someday, people will heat their houses with stored sunshine and gas shortages and coal strikes will be matters of perfect indifference.

Nature is jealous of her secrets, but she has grudgingly given up some and she will give up more as time goes on for she cannot resist forever the blandishments of the endless race of wooers whose hearts and intellects are concentrated upon finding out what else she knows.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 20, 1920, p. 6.

A Sunlight Stove — Solar Energy For Warmth or Cooking

1878

A Sunlight Stove

It has been said that when we burn coal we really warm ourselves, or cook the dinner, by the rays of the sun which fell on the earth thousands of years ago — before the Pyramids of Egypt were erected, or Cleopatra's Needle cut out of the quarry. The heat and light of past ages are stored up in another form in the coal, which is fossil vegetation that when alive, as trees or gigantic ferns, owed its growth to the sun.

A successful attempt has now been made to store up the heat of the sun's rays for immediate and practical use. It was carried out in India, where the sun is, of course, much more powerful than here. The rays were first made to pass through glass fixed an inch away from the actual apparatus, which was consequently entirely surrounded by hot air. The enclosed apparatus, a copper receptacle, was blackened outside — a color which is well known to absorb heat, as any one may prove by wearing a black coat on a warm summer's day. The heat thus retained was further assisted by a conical reflector of silvered glass, and a quantity of mutton and vegetables placed within was perfectly cooked.

To further aid in retaining the absorbed heat when the apparatus was removed from the sunlight it was covered with a rug, as ladies place a "cosy" over the teapot to draw the tea. Since then the inventor has improved upon the process, and can now cook chops or steaks in the open air as quickly as by an ordinary fire, and entirely by the sun's rays. The most remarkable point is, perhaps, that the heat is kept in the apparatus for as long as three and a half hours.

In connection with this subject, just to test the power of the sun's rays in our own country, let any of our readers on a hot summer's day place their hand on the slate roofing of an accessible shed. Where they slope to the south, the slates will be found sometimes so extremely heated that the hand can hardly bear to touch them.

Uncle Sam Regulates Clocks, Time By Fixed Star

1903

HOW TIME IN THE U.S. IS MADE.

Our Uncle Samuel Always Regulates His Clocks by a Fixed Star.

Strange as it may seem, Uncle Sam does not make use of the sun for reckoning time, but, as already described in St. Nicholas, he turns his attention to some of the regular, steady-going stars, or "fixed stars," as they are called.

Every clear night an astronomer with a big telescope looks at certain of these stars and makes his calculations, from which he can tell just when the sun would cross the seventy-fifth meridian. One of the great clocks in the observatory is called the transmitter or sends out the signal that keeps standard time. This clock is set and regulated by the star time, and then every day at three minutes and fifteen seconds before 12 a switch is turned on and the beats of the pendulum of this clock are sent by electricity over the wires to the telegraph offices in Washington and New York.

When the telegraph operators hear this sound on their instruments they know that the noon signal is about to be sent out, and they at once begin to connect the telegraph wires with other towns and cities, until in a minute or two the "tick, tick" of the clock at Washington is heard in hundreds of telegraph offices. The beats stop at ten seconds before 12 as a notice that the next "tick" will be the noon signal, and so as to give the operators time to connect their wires with the standard timeballs and clocks.

There are timeballs in a great many cities — usually on top of some prominent building, where they can easily be seen. The one at Washington is on the roof of the state, war, and navy department building, at the top of a high pole, ready to drop the instant the signal comes over the wire.

In the government offices at Washington and in many places in other cities there are large clocks connected with the observatory by electricity. These are so arranged that when the 12 o'clock signal is flashed over the wires the hands of each one of these clocks spring to 12, no matter what time the clock may show; in this way hundreds of clocks are set to the correct time each day.

Well, the moment the sun is supposed to cross the 75th meridian, the telegraph instruments give a single tick, the timeballs drop, the clocks begin to strike, and everybody in the district knows it is 12 o'clock. — Clifford Howard in St. Nicholas.

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, Iowa, March 5, 1903, page 2.

Comment: So the famous "ball" that drops on New Year's Eve, is that a "timeball" and does it come from this way of regulating clocks?

Cease Your Worry, World Will Last Ten Billion More Years

1920

Paris, April 13 — There's no need to worry about the end of the world for another ten thousand million years, according to Charles Nordmann, the well known scientific writer. Basing his opinion on the latest researches, M. Nordmann states that the rays of the sun, the source of all terrestrial life, should last at least 10,000,000,000 more years, unless there is a collision between the solar body and another planet.

Two famous savants, Hermoltz and Henri Poincare, estimated that the sun would have burned itself out within eight million years, but the recent discovery that the solar mass contains immense deposits of radium, means the sun's heat will have a vastly greater duration.

—The Chronicle Telegram, Elyria, Ohio, April 14, 1920, page 9.