White heat

“ DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire's common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame's conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil's even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge. ”

“ The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal. ”

“ Come down below the color vibrations, and we shall find that those which are too infrequent to be visible, manifest as heat. Naturally there will be as many different kinds of heat as tints of color, because there is as great a range of numbers of vibration. ”

“ Because the glass lens stops all the heat that can affect glass. The twenty feet of air absorbs all the heat that affects air, and no kind of heat is left to affect an instrument made of glass and air; but there are kinds of heat enough to affect instruments made of other things.
A very strong current of heat may be sent right through the heart of a block of ice without melting the ice at all or cooling off the heat in the least. ”

“ To take my start the next morning from so lofty a headland: to feel new life thrill through every limb from the early sun; to drink of the spring which the cliff overshadows where it gushes forth among mossy stones at the root of an ash; to inhale the glorious breeze that tempered the heat, was a delightful beginning of a day’s walk. ”

“ The greatest amount of white light is at C; the yellow contains less of the chemical power than any other portion of the solar spectrum. It has been found that the most intense heat is at the extreme red, b. ”

“ And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men. ”

“ You see how beauty of construction consorts with ponderous strength. Polished iron, glittering brass, and shining mahogany, testify to the excellence of Lancashire handicraft in 1853, the date of the engines. The mahogany is used for casing; and here, as with the boilers, every precaution is used to prevent the escape of heat. As you watch the great cogged fly-wheels spinning round with resistless force, you will hardly be surprised to hear that they impart motion to two miles of ‘shafting,’ which weighs in all six hundred tons, and rotates from sixty to two hundred and fifty times a minute. ”

“ The hot air is now drawn, out of the pipes A B C, and cold air drawn through them, by which they are cooled; while the hot air, from the fire, is thrown through the pipe g into the tubes a b c, and passing through the chimneys k l, there heat the bars and expand them,—both which operations concur in letting down the weight E, and thus, in forcing the water of the pump to whatever destination was previously assigned it. ”

“ From this difference of color in the north and south, and in summer and winter, we may deduce this general fact, that the earth adapts itself in color to the variations of temperature, presenting a dark surface to the heat of summer and the tropics, and a light one to the cold of winter and the frigid zone.
So much then for the fact. Let us now consider the design of such an arrangement. When a body contains more caloric than the air, or the other bodies by which it is surrounded, heat is given off from it in all directions, till the equilibrium is restored. ”

“ There is therefore, a certain utility attached to this Machine, whatever may be it’s merits as a power engine. Our present methods—of destroying coals—are excellent! but our methods of making them useful are defective in the extreme. If you have no draught in your chimneys you are stifled with smoke. If you have much draught, you have little heat—for the chimney swallows it, and half your room is in Norway. ”

“ Colours are actually warm or cold in temperature, as well as in effect upon the eye or the imagination, in fact the words cover a long-tested fact. I remember being told by a painter of his placing a red sunset landscape upon the flat roof of a studio building to dry, and on going to it a few hours afterward he found the surface of it so warm to the touch—so sensibly warmer than the gray and blue and green pictures around it—that he brought a thermometer to test it, and found it had acquired and retained heat. ”

“ This often happens when the temperature of the atmosphere is much higher; and I have seen a copious hoar frost in a clear calm night, though the air was not colder than 40°.”
When I begged my uncle to explain that, he told me that, from the satisfactory observations{78} of Dr. Wells, it appears that the heat which the earth receives from the sun in the day is returned or radiated back again from the earth during the night, and is dispersed in the sky; the surface of the earth thus becomes cold from its sudden loss of heat, and congeals the dew. ”

“ The heat from the fire-boxes, if it rushed directly into the kiln, would fire the pieces near the bottom of the chamber too hard, so slabs of fire-brick, called firebacks, are arranged so as to send the heat up (see Fig. 44) . It then, passing up between the saggers (which, stacked one above the other, form flues to improve the draught) , passes off at the top opening. This aperture, as will be seen in Fig. 44, has a slab supported by bricks above it to control the draught. The heat escapes through the cone, and thus through the chimney. ”

“ What we do find, in exact conformity with obvious physical principles, is that in the hemisphere where the water surface largely predominates over that of land, the temperature is much more uniform than where the land occupies the larger portion of the surface. In the former, the heat of summer is mainly expended in the work of converting water into vapour, and partially restored in winter in the conversion of vapour into water or ice. ”

“ That this heat is furnished by the air, he proves, by finding, that that which we inspire contains more heat than that which we expire, or than the aqueous humor which we expire along with it, in a very considerable proportion; so that if the heat contained in the pure air did not become latent in the blood, it would raise its temperature higher than that of red-hot iron. ”

“ The ground and other solid materials are better radiators than air, and lose heat more rapidly, especially dark-colored materials. Consequently, the solid materials become colder than the surrounding air. This is why frost may form on exposed surfaces, particularly dark ones, when the air temperature remains above freezing. ”

“ The burning of coal and wood produces heat, and the heat thus given out warms the air. Hence it is by the giving off or radiation of the heat from some burning substance that the air of our houses is made warmer than the air outside.
Now, it is really by radiation from a heated body that the air outside gets its heat. In summer, this air is sometimes far hotter than is usual in dwelling-houses in winter. All this heat comes from the sun, which is an enormous hot mass, continually sending out heat in all directions. ”

“ The gentlest summer breezes and the fiercest blasts of winter are produced by the unequal heating of air. We have seen that the air nearest to a stove or hot object becomes hotter than the adjacent air, that it tends to expand and is replaced and pushed upward and outward by colder, heavier air falling downward. We have learned also that the moving liquid or gas carries with it heat which it gradually gives out to surrounding bodies.
When a liquid or a gas moves away from a hot object, carrying heat with it, the process is called convection. ”

“ When the air is kept at 65 to 70 per cent. humidity in winter one will feel comfortable in a much lower temperature—about 68°—than when the air is extremely dry, as it usually is in the average living apartment. With a relative humidity of 30 to 40 per cent. which one now often finds in warm houses in winter, the temperature may be forced up to 75° or over and still one may feel cold, because of the rapid evaporation from the pores of the skin, and the cold created inside the clothing by the heat lost in the process of evaporation. ”

“ If one pint pot of boiling water be placed in out-of-door air that is cold as freezing water, and another be placed at the same time in a room where the air has the warmth of a mild summer day, the former will be deprived of all its excess of heat much sooner than the latter.
Warm bodies lose their excess of heat in two ways. They shoot it off into surrounding space. This is what learned men call “raying” or “radiating” it away. The sun, you know, shoots or rays its heat off to the earth, and so does the fire to your body when you stand before it. ”

“ Aqueous vapor in the atmosphere, whether its presence is rendered sensible to the sight or not, implies the action of heat. Other things being equal, the greater the heat the greater the quantity of watery vapor in the air. In the summer, for instance—though many imagine the contrary—there is much more of such vapor in the air than there is in winter, the greater heat of the air enabling it to keep a greater quantity of the vapor in the invisible form. ”

“ The reason of this is, that we cannot feel warm till we have been cold, and vice versâ."
"Our bodies," resumed Fritz, "however much the thermometer descends, never mark less than thirty-five degrees above zero. In winter the skin shrinks, and becomes a bad conductor of heat from without; but, at the same time, does not allow so much gas and vapor to escape from within. In summer, on the contrary, the skin dilates and allows perspiration to form, a process that consumes a considerable amount of latent heat. ”

“ Vast ridges and crests of incandescent vapour are upheaved by the action of internal heat, which exceeds in intensity the temperature at which the most refractory of terrestrial substances can be volatilised ”

“ Straw, sawdust, wool, feathers, confined air, are insulating substances which retain heat. We might surround with a double envelope of this kind the reservoir holding the sun-heated stones, and in this way we might have our store of solar heat, as now we have our store of ice. It is one problem whether we have to retain cold or to retain heat. ”

“ Going out into the open air, in the temperate, and warm 324 months of the year, we often meet with bodies of warm air, which passing by us in two or three seconds, do not afford time to the most sensible thermometer to seize their temperature. Judging from my feelings only, I think they approach the ordinary heat of the human body. ”

“ Arrived in the cloud-region, this vapour, being condensed, liberates the latent heat which it borrowed from the air and water below; which heat, being now set free and made sensible, raises the temperature of the surrounding air, causing it to expand and ascend still higher ”

“ It is very fortunate for us, that our Spring showers are not of ether; for then, instead of thawing, our land would freeze the harder! The heat of the blood is about 98°; yet man can endure a heat of many degrees more, and even labor under a Summer sun, which would raise the thermometer to 130°, without the temperature of his blood being materially affected, and it is because of perspiration, which absorbs the surplus heat, or, in other words, creates cold. ”

“ The moist air coming into contact with the cold body becomes greatly reduced in temperature and after depositing a heavy dew, lies still in the valleys over the whole surface of the ground. To this body of cold air the atmosphere above radiates heat and when the temperature is reduced to the dew-point the aqueous vapor begins to condense as fog. ”

“ Some of the methods of exploring these depths of cold are treated in the chapter on liquid air already referred to. Our interest here centres in the other extreme of temperature, where the heat vibrations are inconceivably rapid; where nearly all substances known to man become liquids and gases; where, in short, if the experimenter could go high enough, he could reach the awful degree of heat of the burning sun itself, estimated at over 10,000 degrees. ”

“ If you take a red-hot ball out of a furnace and lay it down upon a frosty moor, two processes will go on—the ball will lose heat and the surrounding atmosphere will gain it. There are two ways by which you equalise the temperature of a hotter and a colder body: the one is by the hot one getting cold, and the other is by the cold one getting hot. If you are not heating the world, the world is freezing you. ”

“ The Hot spring is about six miles from the Warm, is much smaller, and has been so hot as to have boiled an egg. Some believe its degree of heat to be lessened. It raises the mercury in Fahrenheit's thermometer to 112 degrees, which is fever heat. It sometimes relieves where the Warm fails. ”

“ But after passing through the lens both the light and the dark center will reach the same focus, and if you can place a thermometer, without burning yourself, near the focus of the dark core, you will notice a great drop in the temperature. So, you see, cold, while negative heat, is a minus quantity; but it needs the presence of heat to make it respond to the same laws that govern heat. ”