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"I don't attach the slightest importance to his, or to any man's words, unless they are sustained by reliable evidence," exclaimed M'Nicholl. "Besides, if I'm not very much mistaken, Pouillet another countryman of yours, Ardan, and an Academician as well as Fourrier esteems the temperature of interplanetary spaces to be at least 256° Fahr. below zero.
"Then," resumed Michel Ardan, "would not this be an opportunity for making that experiment we could not attempt when we were bathed in the solar rays?" "Now or never," answered Barbicane, "for we are usefully situated in order to verify the temperature of space, and see whether the calculations of Fourier or Pouillet are correct." "Any way it is cold enough," said Michel.
The experiments of Herschel and Pouillet upon the amount of solar heat received upon the earth's surface form the starting-point of the computations. The total amount of heat received by the earth from the sun would be sufficient to boil three hundred cubic miles of ice-cold water per hour, and yet the earth arrests but 1/2,300,000,000 of the entire thermal force which the sun emits.
I was thinking of HER! There always is a HER when one is only twenty! After Tangier the ship stopped at Santa Cruz in Teneriffe, to take in water, and during this operation I organized a scientific expedition to the famous Peak of Teneriffe, which is nearly twelve thousand feet high, and from which my professor M. Pouillet had asked me to take some scientific observations.
218 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. M. Pouillet was right and Fourier wrong. That was the undoubted temperature of the starry space. Such is, perhaps, that of the lunar continents, when the orb of night has lost by radiation all the heat which fifteen days of sun have poured into her.
We are just now in the position to find out the temperature of space by actual experiment, and so see whose calculations are right, Fourier's or Pouillet's." "Let's see," asked Ardan, "who was Fourier, and who was Pouillet?"
A few days previous to the beginning of that year, Herschel began observing at the Cape of Good Hope with an "actinometer," and obtained results agreeing quite satisfactorily with those derived by Pouillet from experiments made in France some months later with a "pyrheliometer."
"Pouillet is right, then," said Barbican, "and Fourier wrong." "Another victory for Sorbonne over the Academy!" cried Ardan. "Vive la Sorbonne! Not that I'm a bit proud of finding myself in the midst of a temperature so very distingué though it is more than three times colder than Hayes ever felt it at Humboldt Glacier or Nevenoff at Yakoutsk.
My life there was mortally tedious, and I did no good whatsoever. I listened with all my ears and all my heart to the Abbe Dupanloup, when he gave me religious instruction; to Pouillet, when he taught us physical science; to the great Arago, when he put a sextant into my hands for the first time in my life.
The experiments of MM. Becquerel and Pouillet proved that the resistance of water to the passage of electricity is one thousand million times greater than that of iron; consequently, if the current conveyed by a wire one square mm. thick were to be carried off by water without increased resistance, a surface of contact between the wire and the water of not less than 1,000 square meters must be established.
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