Paper, 'On photometry of the glow lamp' by William De Wiveleslie Abney and Edward Robert Festing

Description

The authors write: 'In a paper which we read before the Royal Society (‘Roy. Soc. Proc.,’ No. 232, 1884) [see PP/5/17] it was shown when a carbon filament or a platinum wire in vacuo was gradually raised in temperature, that the different rays in the visible and invisible regions of the spectrum followed a law governing their intensity. In the dark region of the spectrum (below the red) if the abscissae to a curve represented watts (current X potential), and the ordinates the intensity of the ray under consideration, the curve so formed was hyperbolic, approaching more nearly to the parabolic form as the red was approached.'

Annotations in pencil and ink. Includes a graph of experimental results, a diagram illustrating the 'Rumford (shadow) method' employed by the authors in their experiments and three photographs of experimental apparatus.

Subject: Optics

Received 21 November 1887. Read 8 December 1887.

A version of this paper was published in volume 43 of the Proceedings of the Royal Society as 'On photometry of the glow lamp'.

Reference number

PP/11/11

Earliest possible date

1887

Physical description

Ink and graphite pencil on paper

Page extent

26 pages

Format

Manuscript
Photograph
Diagram