"
"Let's see," asked Ardan, "who was Fourier, and who was Pouillet?"
"Baron Fourier, of the French Academy, wrote a famous treatise on
_Heat_, which I remember reading twenty years ago in Penington's book
store," promptly responded the Captain; "Pouillet was an eminent
professor of Physics at the Sorbonne, where he died, last year, I
think."
"Thank you, Captain," said Ardan; "the cold does not injure your memory,
though it is decidedly on the advance. See how thick the ice is already
on the window panes! Let it only keep on and we shall soon have our
breaths falling around us in flakes of snow."
"Let us prepare a thermometer," said Barbican, who had already set
himself to work in a business-like manner.
A thermometer of the usual kind, as may be readily supposed, would be of
no use whatever in the experiment that was now about to be made. In an
ordinary thermometer Mercury freezes hard when exposed to a temperature
of 40 deg. below zero. But Barbican had provided himself with a _Minimum_,
_self-recording_ thermometer, of a peculiar nature, invented by
Wolferdin, a friend of Arago's, which could correctly register
exceedingly low degrees of temperature.
Pages:
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270