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Page 11
NATURAL AFFECTION BETWEEN METAL AND LIQUID
A little boy had a silver mug that he prized very highly, as it was the
gift of his grandfather. The boy was not born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, but, what was much better, he had a mug often filled with
what he needed.
One day he dipped it into a glass jar of what seemed to him water, and
letting go of it saw it go to the bottom. He went to find his father
to fish it out for him. When he came back his heavy solid mug looked
as if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green
chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy
veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made. Soon even this
fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen. The liquid
had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle. The
liquid was nitric acid.
The poor little boy had often seen salt, and especially sugar, absorbed
in water, but never his precious solid silver mug, and the bright
tears rolled down his cheeks freely.
But his father thought of two things: First, that the blue tint told
him that the jeweler had sold for silver to the grandfather a mug that
was part copper; and secondly, that he would put some common salt into
the nitric acid--which it liked so much better than silver that it
dropped the silver, just as a boy might drop bread when he sought to
fill his hands with cake.
So the father recovered the invisible silver and made it into a
precious mug again.
NATURAL AFFECTION OP METAL AND GAS
A man was waked up one night in a strange house by a noise he could not
understand. He wanted a light, and wanted it very much, but he had no
matches that would take fire by the heat of friction. He knew of many
other ways of starting a fire. If water gets to the cargo of lime in a
vessel it sets the ship on fire. It is of no use to try to put it out
by water, for it only makes more heat. He knew that dried alum and
sugar suitably mixed would burst into flame if exposed to the air; that
nitric acid and oil of turpentine would take fire if mixed; that flint
struck by steel would start fire enough to explode a powder magazine;
and that Elijah called down from heaven a kind of fire that burned
twelve "barrels" of water as easily as ordinary water puts out ordinary
fire. But he had none of these ways of lighting his candle at
hand--not even the last.
So he took a bit of potassium metal, bright as silver, out of a bottle
of naphtha, put it in the candle wick, touched it with a bit of
dripping ice, and so lighted his candle.
The potassium was so avaricious of oxygen that it decomposed the water
to get it. Indeed, it was a case of mutual affection. The oxygen
preferred the company of potassium to that of the hydrogen in the
water, and went to it even at the risk of being burned.
I was so interested in seeing a bit of silver-like metal and water take
fire as they touched that I forgot all about the occasion of the noise.
HINT HELP
Benjamin C. B. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, once went into the lighthouse
at Cape May, and, observing that the window glass was translucent
rather than transparent, asked the keeper why he put ground glass in
the windows. "We do not," said the keeper. "We put in the clear
glass, and the wind blows the sand against it and roughens the outer
surface like ground glass." The answer was to him like the falling
apple to Newton. He put on his thinking cap and went out. It was
better than the cap of Fortunatus to him. He thought, "If nature does
this, why cannot I make a fiercer blast, let sand trickle into it, and
so hurl a million little hammers at the glass, and grind it more
swiftly than we do on stones with a stream of wet sand added?"
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