114 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



having inadvertently been made of brass, they began to melt during 

 the heating process ; but although but a very small portion of the 

 metal had actually become fluid, it penetrated by capillary attraction, 

 aided by the vacuum, into the smallest fissures, soldering the two 

 pieces with extraordinary nicety. 



GALVANIZING IRON. 



It has been recently shown that the process of zincing iron, or, as 

 it is generally called, " galvanizing," which has been the subject of 

 more than one recent patent, and, of course, of much litigation, was 

 practised in France about the year 1 740 precisely as it is done at this 

 day ; and a description of the process was given by Bishop Watson in 

 his well-known and widely-circulated Chemical Essays, published 

 towards the end of the last century. 



NEW CHRONOGRAPH. 



M. Lissajous lias presented to the French Academy a plan of a 

 new instrument for measuring small intervals of time, by which he 

 proposes to estimate accurately the five-hundred-thousandth- part of 

 a second. The instrument is to be composed of, first, a silvered 

 drum about forty inches in circumference, which is to be coated with 

 lamp-black for the experiment ; it makes three turns per second. 

 Second, a tuning-fork giving five hundred vibrations per second, 

 with the electric apparatus for preserving its vibrations according to 

 the plan of M. Lissajous ; a point fixed upon this marks on the drum 

 during the experiment. Third, an electrical apparatus to give a 

 spark at the beginning and end of each phenomenon. That which 

 characterizes the new apparatus is the length of the line on the 

 drum, which corresponds to the very short duration of the phenome- 

 non, and the facility of dividing it by the microscope. Kosmos. 



THE PRODUCTION OF SOUNDS AND VISIBLE VIBRATIONS BY VOL- 

 TAIC CURRENTS. 



Mr. George Gore, the celebrated English physicist, has furnished 

 to the Hoyal Society the following particulars respecting the produc- 

 tion of vibrations and sounds by voltaic electricity. He says : 



If a large quantity of electricity is made to pass through a suitable 

 good conducting electrolyte into a small surface of pure mercury, and 

 especially if the mercurial surface is in the form of a narrow strip 

 about one-eighth of an inch wide, strong vibrations occur ; and sym- 

 metrical crispations of singular beauty, accompanied by definite 

 sounds, are produced at the mutual surfaces of the liquid metal and 

 electrolyte. 



In my experiments the crispations and sounds were readily pro- 

 duced by taking a circular pool of mercury from one to three inches 

 in diameter, surrounded by a ring of mercury about one-eighth or 

 one-sixteenth of an inch wide, both being contained in a circular ves- 

 sel of glass or gutta-percha, covering the liquid metal to a depth of 

 about half an inch with a rather strong aqueous solution of cyanide of 

 potassium, connecting the pool of mercury by a platinum wire with 

 the positive pole of a battery capable of forcing a rather large quan- 



