A great chemical feat was achieved on Saturday last.
Oxygen, which had hitherto defied all attempts to reduce it by compression to the liquid form, was liquefied by M. Raoul Pictet at Geneva, under a pressure which did not exceed 300 atmospheres, and at• a temperature which is said to have been 100° below the zero of the Centigrade thermometer,— which is equivalent to 148° below the zero of Fahrenheit. The interest of the experiment lies in the fact that there are now only two gases left—hydrogen and nitrogen—which still defy the attempt to reduce them to a liquid form. When these are re- duced, it will have been shown that gases differ from those bodies which we ordinarily see in the liquid or solid state, only in the amount of compression and of cold which they require to reduce them to liquids and solids. Every solid and liquid is capable of being expanded by heat into the gaseous form, and every gas of being reduced by cold and pressure into a liquid and a solid.
Previous page
