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Updated: May 4, 2025
Four days after the final plans had been completed the last of the supplies were being assembled in the portable metal shed that was to house the completed machine. The shining tungsto-steel alloy frame members were rapidly being welded in place by cathode ray welding torches in the hands of skilled artisans.
Far overhead swept a black roof fading into the horizon, beneath his feet was the same metal substance. In the midst of this giant work soared the base of a tower that pierced the roof thousands of feet above. Everywhere loomed machines, enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundred feet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he had never encountered. The air was bluish, electric.
Lenard himself, however, with that absence of even involuntary prejudice common to all great minds, undertook to demonstrate that the opinion he at first held could no longer be accepted, and succeeded in repeating the experiment of M. Perrin on cathode rays in the air and even in vacuo.
It is right to add that some authors, notwithstanding the proved impossibility of deviating them in a magnetic field, have not renounced the idea of comparing them with the cathode rays.
That pole which is connected with the positive side of the battery is called the anode, or upper pole, and that which is connected with the negative, or receptive, side of the battery, is called the cathode, or lower pole.
The artifice used was suggested to Professor Lenard by an experiment of Hertz. The great physicist had, in fact, shortly before his premature death, taken up this important question of the cathode rays, and his genius left there, as elsewhere, its powerful impress.
It is of the order of one tenth of the speed of light, and it may rise as high as one third. The cathode particle therefore goes about three thousand times faster than the earth in its orbit. The relation is also invariable, even when the substance of which the cathode is formed is changed or one gas is substituted for another.
It is, on the contrary, very general, and ionisation is just as well produced by the cathode rays, by the radiations emitted by radio-active bodies, by the ultra-violet rays, by heating to a high temperature, by certain chemical actions, and finally by the impact of the ions already existing in neutral molecules.
A molecular bombardment from the cathode is, in his opinion, going on, and when the shots, that is to say, the molecules of air, strike the wall of the tube, or any other body within the tube, the shock gives rise to phosphorescence or fluorescence and to heat.
Thus when some opaque substance, such as iron, is placed between the cathode and the sides of the glass tube so that it casts a shadow in a certain spot on the glass for some little time, it is found on removing the opaque substance or changing its position that the area of glass at first covered by the shadow now responded to the rays in a different manner from the surrounding glass.
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