Soap-Bubbles

Abstract

SOAP-BUBBLES fill the same happy position as do those charming books in which Lewis Carroll describes the adventures of Alice, in that they serve equally to delight the young and to attract the old. Clerk-Maxwell has mentioned the fact that on an Etruscan vase in the Louvre are seen the figures of children amusing themselves with bubbles, while to-day the same subject is being forced on the attention of the world by a strange development of modern enterprise. On the other hand, the bubble has occupied the minds of scientific men of all times. Sir Isaac Newton, Sir David Brewster, and Faraday, not to mention many others, devoted themselves to the soap-bubble as a means for investigating the subtleties of light. Plateau a few years ago delighted men of science with that wonderful book in which he, a blind man, expounded, in the clearest and most elegant manner, the result of years of labour on this one subject. Lately, Profs. Reinold and Rücker have employed the soap-film in investigations which tend to throw more light on the molecular constitution of bodies. These experiments will be remembered by all who saw them as being no less beautiful than instructive. The latest experiments with bubbles, which were shown by Mr. C. V. Boys to the Physical Society and at the Royal Society conversazione, and of which a full account is to be found in the May number of the Philosophical Magazine, depend upon no property which is not well known, and, unlike those referred to above,are not intended to increase our scientific knowledge; and yet no one would have ventured to predict that bubbles would submit to the treatment described in the paper, or would have expected such simple means to produce such beautiful results.