April 27, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



645 



made by Professor Ramsay as to this al- 

 leged anticipation was expected, but strange 

 to say Professor Olszewski published no 

 confirmations of the experiments detailed 

 by Professor Ramsay in scientific journals 

 of date immediately preceding my paper or 

 during the following years 1896, 1897 or up 

 to May, 1898. The moment the announce- 

 ment was made by me to the Royal Society 

 in May, 1898 that, after years of labor, hy- 

 drogen had at last been obtained as a static 

 liquid, Professor Ramsay repeated the story 

 to the Royal Society that Olszewski had an- 

 ticipated my results (basing the assertion 

 solely on the contents of the old letter re- 

 ceived some two ajid a half years before), 

 in spite of the fact that during the interval 

 he. Professor Ramsay, must have known 

 that Professor Olszewski had never corrob- 

 orated in any publication either the form 

 of the experiments he had so minutely de- 

 scribed or the results which were said to 

 follow. Challenged by me at the Royal 

 Society Meeting on May 12, 1898, to pro- 

 duce Olszewski's letter of 1895, he did not 

 do so, but at the next meeting of the So- 

 ciety, Professor Ramsay read a letter he 

 had received during the interval from Pro- 

 fessor Olszewski, denying that he had ever 

 stated that he had succeeded in producing 

 static liquid hydrogen. This oral com- 

 munication of the contents of the new Ols- 

 zewski letter (of which it is to be regretted 

 there is no record in the published proceed- 

 ings of the Royal Society) is the only kind 

 of retraction Professor Ramsay has thought 

 fit to make of his published misstatements 

 of facts. N"o satisfactory explanation has 

 yet been given by Professor Ramsay of his 

 twice repeated categorical statements made 

 before scientific bodies of the results of ex- 

 periments which, in fact, had never been 

 made by their alleged author. The public- 

 ity that has been given to this controversy 

 makes it imperative that the matter should 

 not be passed over, but once for all recorded. 



The report of a Friday Evening Discourse 

 on ' Kew Researches on Liquid Air,' * con- 

 tains a drawing of the apparatus employed 

 for the production of a jet of hydrogen con- 

 taining visible liquid. This is reproduced 



in Fig. 1. A represents one of the hy- 

 drogen cylinders ; B and C, vacuum vessels 

 containing carbolic acid under exhaustion 

 and liquid air respectively ; D is the coil^ 

 G the pin-hole nozzle, and F the valve. 

 By means of this hydrogen jet, liquid air 

 can be quickly transformed into a hard 

 solid. It was shown that such a jet could 

 be used to cool bodies below the tempera- 

 ture that it is possible to reach by the use 

 of liquid air, but all attempts to collect the 

 liquid hydrogen from the jet in vacuum 

 vessels failed. No other investigator im- 

 proved on my results, f or has indeed 

 touched the subject during the last three 

 years. The type of apparatus used in these 

 experiments worked well, so it was resolved 

 to construct a much larger liquid-air plant, 

 and to combine with it circuits and ar- 

 rangements for the liquefaction of hy- 



* 'Proceedings ' c£ the Eoyal Institution, 1896. 

 t ' Proceedings of the Chemical Society ' (No. 158), 

 1895. 



