7(32 Prof. H. E. Armstrong on Low-Temperature Research 



been more obvious. Under his magic care, the soap-bubble has 

 ceased to be an ephermal plaything of the moment. Horizontal 

 Hack films feet across, huge Mack spheres, 16 inches or more in 

 diameter — their blackness is proof of their infinite tenuity — have been 

 preserved during over a year and might well last for ever if the con- 

 ditions of equilibrium could be maintained. The last three Friday 

 evenings have been devoted to their display. Let us hope that the 

 complete story may soon be told of their genesis and that the lessons 

 derived from their study may be adequately described. 



Soap is all but absent from the giant films and bubbles Sir James 

 €an now call into being at will, so that they are essentially water 

 films. That water has wondrous properties — that it is the most 

 wonderful of all liquids — we already know ; but the magic affinities 

 of its molecules, the individuality of their behaviour, were never so 

 clearly displayed as they are in these tenuous films of a new era. 

 That they have been a solace to their progenitor during a period of 

 indescribable stress is not merely matter for congratulation but proof 

 that man is able to rise above his surroundings : a sign of hope we 

 may well lay to heart. 



Here my record ends — in wonder, at the wealth of performance 

 I have been able to chronicle. It has been said : — " There is a myth 

 among some Eastern nations that at the birth of Genius an unkind 

 fairy marred all the good gifts of the other fairies by depriving it of 

 the power of knowing where to stop." The story is no myth, it seems. 

 It is clear some such Fairy has been active throughout the period of 

 the present Fullerian Fellowship, these last years especially. 



THE HIGH VACUUM SEPTENNATF, 1907-191^. 

 The Dewar yACUu:M Vessel. 



The coming of age of the introduction of the vacaum jacketed 

 vessel into practice was proclaimed by Sir James Dewar in his lecture 

 on Friday, January 23, 1914. As he then remarked : — 



" The insulating properties of a vacuum in preventing the influx 

 of heat by the elimination of convection currents had been known to 

 physicists ever since the investigations of Dulong and Petit on the 

 laws of radiation, in the early part of the last century, proved the 

 important part played by the gas particles surrounding a body in 

 dissipating heat otherwise than by pure radiation." 



In 1873, he had himself used a highly exhausted, annular, brass 

 vessel for calorimetric purposes, when determining the specific heat 

 of Hydrogenium — that is to say, hydrogen condensed in palladium. 



