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Updated: May 26, 2025
The reciprocating forms found suitable for steam and gas engines are hardly adaptable for experiments in the direction of economising this source of power, one fatal objection in the majority of cases being the corrosive effects of the gases generated upon the insides of cylinders and other working parts.
Sir John French says of these gases: "The effect of this poison is not merely disabling, or even painlessly fatal, as suggested in the German press. Those of its victims who do not succumb on the field and who can be brought into hospitals suffer acutely and, in a large proportion of cases, die a painful and lingering death.
This is the case with gases themselves, as demonstrated, for example, by a very elegant experiment of M. Becquerel on the dispersion of the vapour of sodium. Moreover, it may happen that yet more complications may be met with, as no substance is transparent for the whole extent of the spectrum.
But, in their turn, the Martians brought into use new weapons. First they hurled great rocks and chunks of lead at the projectile, but, as the missiles weighed only a third as much as they would have done on the earth, they only dented the heavy steel sides. Finding that this would not answer, the little people created clouds of noxious gases, that swirled around the projectile like a fog.
In the dark even the gases will freeze on its surface, as there is no atmosphere to retain the heat. An ingenious speculation as to the effect on the earth of this dislodgment of 5,000,000,000 cubic miles of its substance is worth noting. It supposes that the bed of the Pacific Ocean represents the enormous gap torn in its side by the delivery of the moon.
It is, however, singular that it should be the spectrum of crypton, that is to say, of the heaviest gas of the group, which appears most clearly in the upper regions of the atmosphere. Among the gases most difficult to liquefy, hydrogen has been the object of particular research and of really quantitative experiments. Its properties in a liquid state are now very clearly known.
Hence they differ from the volcanic rocks, not only by their more crystalline texture, but also by the absence of tuffs and breccias, which are the products of eruptions at the earth's surface, or beneath seas of inconsiderable depth. They differ also by the absence of pores or cellular cavities, to which the expansion of the entangled gases gives rise in ordinary lava.
But in another view the universal presence of these gases in the air makes it seem all the more wonderful that they could so long have evaded detection, considering that chemistry has been a precise science for more than a century.
Our process for reducing gases into fluids is of admirable simplicity. A simple bent tube, or a reduction of temperature by artificial means, have superseded the powerful compressing machines of the early experimenters.
It is composed of rare gases, which, as the experience of Halley's comet many years ago showed, are unable to penetrate the atmosphere even when an actual encounter occurs. In this case there cannot even be an encounter; the comet is now moving away. Its division is not an unprecedented occurrence, for many previous comets have met with similar accidents.
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