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Ingenious means of applying this principle, in connection with the means previously employed, were developed independently by Pictet in Geneva and Cailletet in Paris, and a little later by the Cracow professors Wroblewski and Olzewski, also working independently. Pictet, working on a commercial scale, employed a series of liquefied gases to gain lower and lower temperatures by successive stages.
M. Wroblewski, of Cracow, who had witnessed some of M. Cailletet's experiments, and obtained his apparatus, and M. Olzewski, in association with him, also experimented with ethylene, and had the pleasure of recording their first complete success early in April, 1883. Oxygen, having been previously compressed in a glass tube, became a permanent liquid, with a clearly defined meniscus.
M. Cailletet devised a cheaper process, by employing another hydrocarbon that rises from the mud of marshes, and is called formene. MM. Cailletet, Wroblewski, and Olzewski have continued their experiments in liquefaction, and acquired increased facility in the handling of liquid ethylene, formene, atmospheric air, oxygen, and nitrogen.
Under certain conditions, however, most interesting chemical experiments have been made in which the liquefied gases, particularly oxygen, are utilized. Thus Olzewski found that a bit of wood lighted and thrust into liquid oxygen burns as it would in gaseous oxygen, and a red-hot iron wire thrust into the liquid burns and spreads sparks of iron.
This result was obtained in 1877 by Pictet and Cailletet almost simultaneously. Cailletet had also liquefied the newly discovered acetylene gas. Five years later Wroblewski liquefied marsh gas, and the following year nitrogen; while carbonic oxide and nitrous oxide yielded to Olzewski in 1884.
The work of Professor Dewar has perhaps been the most comprehensive and varied, but the researches of Pictet, Wroblewski, and Olzewski have also been important, and it is not always possible to apportion credit for the various discoveries accurately, since the authorities themselves are in unfortunate disagreement in several questions of priority.
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