JANUARY 18, 1901.] 
THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY. 
Tur American Physical Society held its 
annual meeting at Columbia University on 
Thursday, December 27,1900. The follow- 
ing officers were elected for the year 1901: 
President, H. A. Rowland ; Vice-President, 
A. A. Michelson ; Secretary, Ernest Merritt ; 
Treasurer, W. Hallock ; Councillors, Henry 
Crew and E. B. Rosa. 
Professor M. I. Pupin, in a paper on 
anomalous propagation of electrical waves, 
called attention to certain peculiar results 
which he had obtained when trying to im- 
prove the telephone transmission of a line, 
by counteracting its capacity by the intro- 
duction of self-induction coils between the 
outgoing line and the return. By this 
means he was able to considerably improve 
the transmission of certain frequencies, but 
he had not succeeded in reenforcing a suffi- 
cient range of frequencies to avoid a serious 
distortion of the quality of articulate speech. 
The discussion by Professors Rowland 
and Webster and others raised the question 
as to whether Professor Pupin’s abnormal 
velocity of transmission, considerably above 
that of light, derived from the relation that 
velocity is equal to the wave-length divided 
by the period, is justifiable, since it is doubt- 
ful what is to be called the ‘ wave-length’ 
in a coil. 
President Rowland reported that his 
search for an electromotive force due to 
dragging a wire through the ether had so 
far failed, and that it would appear that so 
far as the limits which he had used were 
concerned, it was safe to conclude that no 
positive results are attainable. 
In a theoretical consideration of certain 
magneto-optical phenomena President Row- 
land pointed out that by considering each 
of two particles as having quantitatively 
different charges of electricity, he had been 
able to deduce formule which account for 
many of the electro-optical effects, as the 
Zeeman, Faraday and other effects, as well 
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as refraction, double refraction, dispersion, 
dispersion in double refraction and absorp- 
tion. If the charge of one of the particles 
is practically infinite as compared with the 
other, then his formule reduce to the or- 
dinary ones. If the two charges are equal, 
no Zeeman effect could take place. 
Professor E. F. Nichols presented the re- 
sults of his investigations upon the energy 
radiated from certain stars and planets as 
measured with his radiometer, which proves 
- to be about thirty times as sensitive as the 
radiomicrometer of Professor Boys. The 
unit used to express the quantity of energy 
was the hundred-millionth part of the en- 
ergy received from a candle at a distance of 
one meter, 7. ¢., 10-* meter-candle. The re- 
sults obtained were as follows:—Vega, 0.51, 
—Arcturus, 1.14,—Jupiter, 2.38,—and Sa- 
turn, 0.37. 
Two papers by Professor R. W. Wood 
were read by the Secretary. In the first he 
outlined the method of making very efficient 
cyanine prisms and of showing their anomal- 
ous dispersion. In thesecond he called at- 
tention to certain peculiarities in the prop- 
agation of waves reflected in a spherical 
mirror. 
A brief résumé of the work of the Paris 
Congress of Physics was given by Professor 
A. W. Webster. The reports of the con- 
gress have appeared in three volumes, and 
a ‘Proces Verbaux.’ It is of general in- 
terest that this congress by its commission 
on units expressed the belief that it is de- 
sirable: 
1. That a unit of pressure be used, called 
the bary, which is the C.G.S. unit (that is a 
dyune per square centimeter). The megabary, 
equal to 10° C.G.S. units, may, for practical 
purposes, be considered equal to the pres- 
sure of a column of mercury 75 em. high at 
0°.C. under normal conditions of gravity. 
2. That the final results of calorimetric 
experiments be expressed in the C.G.5. me- 
chanical units (erg and joule). 
