Abstract
FOR his Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on November 1, Mr. C. C. Paterson took as his subject “The Liberation of the Electron”. He described how the whole art of electrical engineering had been born again when the electricity, which the older engineers had confined to wires and cables, was liberated from them by the physicist and handed back to the engineer to be exploited in the wireless valve, the photo-electric cell, the cathode ray tube, and other devices which use ‘free electrons'. He demonstrated the essential causes which enabled these devices to establish broadcasting, long-distance telephony, television, and similar social services. The secret of the revolution is that a stream of free electrons, whether in a vacuum or a gas, can be manipulated with such facility that the electricity can be increased or decreased at the rate of millions of times per second, or alternatively as slowly as desired, and no limit is set to the amount of energy which can be so controlled. So much of what we see and hear consists, if analysed, of extremely rapid happenings. The eye and the ear are unconscious of these high-speed fluctuations and vibrations, although sensitive to them. In order that wo may faithfully reproduce and transmit these very rapid oscillations and variations, it is necessary to make exact electrical copies of them. This is done by suitably controlling a stream of free electrons. Mr. Paterson went on to point out how the free electron is also being used in astounding ways in the art of electric lighting. The many coloured luminous discharge tubes used for display purposes in the streets are due to the action of ‘free electrons'. They have led the way to more brilliant and more efficient industrial light sources. Some of them give much more light for the electricity consumed than existing filament lamps. The effects are the result of high-speed (up to six million miles an hour) encounters between free electrons and the gas atoms in the tubes.
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Liberation of the Electron. Nature 136, 748 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136748b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136748b0