Convex lens

“ But, the most beautiful exhibition of the images of objects formed by convex lenses, is made 73 by darkening a room, and placing a convex lens of a long focal distance in a hole cut out of the window-shutter; when a beautiful inverted landscape, or picture of all the objects before the window, will be painted on a white paper or screen placed in the focus of the glass. The image thus formed exhibits not only the proportions and colours, but also the motions of all the objects opposite the lens, forming as it were a living landscape. ”

“ Here a convex lens produces a distant, and therefore magnified image of a near transparent object, which is strongly enlightened by a lamp placed behind it; a concave mirror is generally put behind the lamp to throw as much of the light as possible on the object, which is some group of figures painted on a glass slide, and is inverted so that the image may be cast in an erect position, on a wall or a white sheet, at a proper distance. ”

“ The effects produced by the action of concave mirrors may be produced with just as much facility by convex lenses. If a body is placed in a focus of a lens which receives the direct rays of the sun, the heat as well as the light will be concentrated at one point; and if the object is combustible, it will take fire sooner or later, according to the size of the lens. All the experiments mentioned by Buffon as being produced by a concave mirror are equally obtainable with a concave lens. ”

“ The alteration of the direction of the marginal rays is produced by refraction, a thin plano-concave lens being placed in front of the convex one (Pl. XII. fig. 25) . The doubly convex lens is composed of crown glass, and the concave lens of flint glass, which has a higher refractive and dispersive power than crown glass. In this way we get a compound lens, which, if the two lenses had the same refractive power, would simply amount to a plano-concave lens with the marginal portions removed. ”

“ Hence the focus of a double-convex lens will be at just half the distance, or half the length, of the focus of a plano-convex lens having the same curvature on one side. The distance of the focus from the lens will depend as much on the degree of curvature as upon the refracting power (termed the index of refraction) of the glass of which it may be formed. A lens of crown-glass will have a longer focus than a similar one of flint-glass ”

“ The centering of a convex lens can be watched by keeping the edge as nearly uniform of thickness as possible with a concave lens, if the original blank is made larger than necessary and care is taken to make the sides parallel, the centering can be watched by keeping a flat edge of equal width around the concave portion, the lens being placed back on the flat tool, from time to time, as the work progresses. If care is used the lens need be made but little larger than the finished size to allow for the final accurate centering to be described later. ”

“ Another very useful form of doublet was proposed by Sir John Herschel, chiefly like the Coddington lens, for the sake of a wide field, and chiefly to be used in the hand. It is shown in Fig. 9; it consists of a double convex or crossed lens, having the radii of curvature as 1 to 6, and of a plane concave lens whose focal length is to that of the convex lens as 13 to 5. ”

“ Lenses are pieces of glass having curved surfaces. When a beam of light passes through a lens it is also bent out of its original direction, or refracted.
A convex lens, see Fig. 146, is a lens which is thicker in the middle than it is at the edges. A convex lens is used for magnifying an object; or for forming an image so that it can be magnified by another lens as in a telescope, for forming an image on the screen of a camera, and for bringing the heat waves of the Sun to a focus, as with a burning glass. ”

“ It does not require a great amount of imagination to recognise that the double convex lens, that is the lens with two outwardly curved faces is little more than a pair of prisms placed base to base, or more accurately, a number of prisms so arranged as shown in the diagram. ”

“ A convex lens brings light to a focus, and it also brings radiant heat to a focus. And that is why you can set fire to things by holding a convex lens in the sunlight so that the light and heat are focused on something that will burn. All the sun's radiant heat that strikes the lens is brought practically to one point, and all the light which is absorbed at this point is changed to heat. When so much heat is concentrated at one point, that point becomes hot enough to catch fire. ”

“ When very high powers are required, a single plano-convex lens is sometimes used, but although there is less loss of light in this case, the field of view is so contracted in comparison with that given with other eyepieces that the single lens is seldom used. ”

“ One that is flat on one side and bulges out on the other is called a convex lens; if it bulges out on both sides it is a double convex lens; if it is hollowed in on one side and flat on the other it is a concave lens; if hollowed in on both sides we call it a double concave lens; and when it is hollowed in on one side and bulged out on the other, as any watch crystal does, it is a concave convex lens."
"Where did you learn all that, Sam?" asked Tom. ”

“ Up to the present we have assumed that all rays falling on a convex lens are brought to a point or focus, but this is not strictly true, for the edges of a lens turn the rays rather too much out of their course, so that they will not come to a point; just as the rays reflected from a spherical mirror do not form a single focus. The marginal rays will be spread over a certain circular surface, just as the colour due to chromatic aberration covered a surface surrounding the focus. ”

“ But instead of gathering up the rays from the carbon-points by a condensing lens, we gather them up by a concave mirror (m m', fig. 48) , silvered in front and placed behind the carbons (P) . By this mirror we can cause the rays to issue through the orifice in front of the camera, either parallel or convergent. They are now parallel, and therefore to a certain extent diffused. We place a convex lens (L) in the path of the beam; the light is converged to a focus (C) , and at that focus paper is not only pierced, but it is instantly set ablaze. ”

“ The single lens has a very small sharp field, hardly 10° in angular extent, the image falling off rapidly in quality as it departs from the axis. If plano-convex, as is the eye lens of common two-lens oculars, it works best with the curved side to the eye, i.e., reversed from its usual position, the spherical aberration being much less in this position. ”

“ If the refractive powers of the lenses were exactly proportional to their dispersive powers, as Newton erroneously thought, it is evident that the concave lens would pitch all the rays outwards to an amount which would annul both the chromatic variation and the total refraction of the convex lens, leaving the pair without power to bring anything to a focus. Fortunately flint glass as compared with crown glass has nearly double the dispersion between red and violet, and only about 20% greater refractive power for the intermediate yellow ray. ”

“ Now in the eye there is an adjustment of this sort, but it is limited so that objects begin to get indistinct when brought nearer the eye than perhaps six inches, because the rays become too divergent for the lens to bring them to a focus on the retina, and they tend to come to a focus behind the retina, as in Fig. 34; but we may assist the eye lens by using a glass convex lens in front of it, between it and the object. It is for this reason that spectacle glasses are used to enable long-sighted persons to see clearly. ”

“ If there is a parallel beam proceeding from a lamp, or from the sun, and it falls on the form of lens, called a convex lens, which bulges out in the middle, we learn from Fig. 27, that the upper part acts like the upper prism just considered and turns the light down, and the lower acts in the reverse manner and turns the light up, and the sides act in a similar manner ”

“ He was the first to describe an instrument fitted with a sight and paper screen for observing the diameters of the sun and moon in a dark room. In his later book, Dioptrice (1611) , he fully discusses refraction and the use of lenses, showing the action of the double convex lens in the camera obscura, with the principles which regulate its use and the reason of the reversal of the image. He also demonstrates how enlarged images can be produced and projected on paper by using a concave lens at a suitable distance behind the convex, as in modern telephotographic lenses. ”

“ How does a microscope make things look larger?
Everybody knows, of course, that a convex lens in the right position makes things look larger. People use convex lenses to make print look larger when they read, and for that reason such lenses are often called reading glasses. For practical purposes it is not necessary to understand how a convex lens magnifies; the important thing is the fact that it does magnify. ”

“ A single convex lens does not give an image free from the prismatic colours, because the rays of different colour making up white light are not equally refrangible, and thus do not all come to a focus together, the violet, for instance, being nearest the lens, the red farthest off. ”

“ Nothing is said about the use of a lens or of solar observations. The second edition, in which he in the same words discloses the use of a convex lens in the aperture as a secret he had intended to keep, was not published till 1589, thirty-one years after the first. In this interval the use of the lens was discovered and clearly described by Daniello Barbaro, a Venetian noble, patriarch of Aquileia, in his work La Pratica della perspettiva (p. 192) , published in 1568, or twenty-one years before Porta’s mention of it. ”

“ The whole arrangement as thus altered for experiments in parallel polarised light is shown in position in Fig. 79. The change is readily made, a gap in the plinth-bed guides near the analysing Nicol enabling it to be effected without removing either of the prisms, the analyser being simply drawn along a few inches nearer the end in order to expose the changing gap. The pair of lenses consists of a plano-convex lens of 5 inches focus and 21⁄4 inches diameter, and another plano-convex lens of 81⁄2 inches focus and 2 inches aperture, with their convex faces turned towards each other. ”