Abstract
IT is to be hoped that the publication last year of the collected works of John Aitken has led many physicists to renew their acquaintance with his writings. The main features of his work are widely known, but it is not so generally recognised that on a number of points which are still obscure, he has many suggestive observations. In 1880, without knowledge of the earlier work of Coulier, Aitken discovered the nuclei of cloudy condensation in the atmosphere. For nearly forty years he continued to make observations on these nuclei, which he generally referred to as “dust.” He devised and constructed various forms of dust-counter, all characterised by ingenuity and mechanical skill of a high order, but most of them somewhat difficult of successful operation by any but the expert hand of the inventor. In his later years, writers on “large ions “caused him some uneasiness. He feared that the role of nuclei of cloudy condensation was being taken from his dust particles and attributed to some bodies of an electrical origin. But this fear was unfounded; what was suggested was that a certain number of Aitken's nuclei are charged and that these are the large atmospheric ions discovered by Langevin.
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NOLAN, J. Dust in the Atmosphere. Nature 114, 720–722 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114720a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114720a0