our side.

CHAPTER XIII

PRODUCTS OF THE ELECTRIC FURNACE

The control of man over the materials of nature has been vastly enhanced
by the recent extension of the range of temperature at his command. When
Fahrenheit stuck the bulb of his thermometer into a mixture of snow and
salt he thought he had reached the nadir of temperature, so he scratched
a mark on the tube where the mercury stood and called it zero. But we
know that absolute zero, the total absence of heat, is 459 of
Fahrenheit's degrees lower than his zero point. The modern scientist can
get close to that lowest limit by making use of the cooling by the
expansion principle. He first liquefies air under pressure and then
releasing the pressure allows it to boil off. A tube of hydrogen
immersed in the liquid air as it evaporates is cooled down until it can
be liquefied. Then the boiling hydrogen is used to liquefy helium, and
as this boils off it lowers the temperature to within three or four
degrees of absolute zero.

The early metallurgist had no hotter a fire than he could make by
blowing charcoal with a bellows. This was barely enough for the smelting
of iron. But by the bringing of two carbon rods together, as in the
electric arc light, we can get enough heat to volatilize the carbon at
the tips, and this means over 7000 degrees Fahrenheit. By putting a
pressure of twenty atmospheres onto the arc light we can raise it to
perhaps 14,000 degrees, which is 3000 degrees hotter than the sun. This
gives the modern man a working range of about 14,500 degrees, so it is
no wonder that he can perform miracles.

When a builder wants to make an old house over into a new one he takes
it apart brick by brick and stone by stone, then he puts them together
in such new fashion as he likes. The electric furnace enables the
chemist to take his materials apart in the same way. As the temperature
rises the chemical and physical forces that hold a body together
gradually weaken. First the solid loosens up and becomes a liquid, then
this breaks bonds and becomes a gas. Compounds break up into their
elements. The elemental molecules break up into their component atoms
and finally these begin to throw off corpuscles of negative electricity
eighteen hundred times smaller than the smallest atom. These electrons
appear to be the building stones of the universe. No indication of any
smaller units has been discovered, although we need not assume that in
the electron scie