FARADAY'S GREAT WORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21100, 6 February 1932, Page 7 (Supplement)

FARADAY'S GREAT WORK.

" UNRIVALLED GENIUS."

Lord Rutherford, in his recent address on Faraday, said all scientific men were glad to do honour to the memory of Faraday as one of the greatest of experimental philosophers. The storv of his life and work had a strong appeal to mankind, not only because of his remarkable contributions to knowledge, but for his outstanding personality and nobility of character. In reading his collected researches, the record of his life's work, one was impressed not. only by his remarkable powers of physical insight and genius as an experimenter, but by the clarity and vigour of his exposition. There was everywhere such a freshness of thought and vividness of perception that it was difficult for the reader to recall that most of the work was written nearly a century ago, when knowledge of the physical and chemical sciences was in its infancy.

While they had met to celebrate one of Faraday's most famous discoveries, the foundation-stone of the great electrical industry of to-day, said Lord Rutherford, they must not forget that that was only one of a number of great contributions made by Faraday to different branches of science. Leaving aside bis important additions to knowledge in chemistiy and many branches of physics, his work on electricity and magnetism revolutionised human knowledge and laid the foundation of the modern views of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Lord Rutherford went on to describe the almost, primitive conditions under which Faraday carried out liis earliei' experiments. When they considered the life work of Faraday, he added, it was clear that his researches were guided and inspired by the strong belief that the various forces of nature were interrelated and dependent on one another. It was not too much to say that his philosophic conviction gave the impulse and driving power in most of his researches and was the key to his extraordinary success in adding to knowledge. The more they studied the work of Farnduy with the perspective of time, the more they were impressed by his unrivalled genius as an experimenter and natural philosopher. FIRST WIRELESS VALVE. Manv vears ago Edison was experimenting with electric lamps, trying to discover how the blackening of the inside of the bulbs came out in those of the old carbon type. He found that if a plate of metal was sealed into the bulb ana electrified positively, a current passed through the vacuum from the filament to this plate. He noticed that the current always travelled from the filament io the plate; nothing could make a current pass in the opposite direction. He thought nothing of the discovery, and no use could be found for it, for it was many years before wireless was to be, heard of. It was known as the Edison effect, and remained as a laboratory curiosity. Before we can hear anything of wireless signals the waves must be rectified. Each wave consists of a push of current in one direction, followed by a pull in the other. Rectification means straining out the pulls ana leaving only the pushes. -All early methods of doing this were complicated and unsatisfactory. Then Professor -J. A. Fleming had an inspiration. He made the first wireless valve in which a filament and a plate were placed in a vacuum inside a glass bulb. The Edison effect was harnessed, for the valve would respond only to the pushes and automatically eliminated the pulls. But for the invention of the valvp there would have been no broadcasting to-day. JOURNEY TO THE MOON. A trip to the moon within the next few decades, says Professor John Stewart, of Princeton University, is definitely out of the question. But, he adds, in discussing modern science to-day, " our descendants within a century will be able to make the lunar journey in a rocketpropelled ship." This American scientist of national repute assumes that the present trends of vehicular speeds will continue, but he admits that the cost of a rocket ship designed for speed of several miles per second and quipped with a power plant developing billions of kilowatts will be around £400,000.000, as we estimate money to-day. Fuel is the chief problem.