| Description | This volume, headed 'Atmospheric Electricity, July 1898', discusses a great variety of topics including 'Possible sources of atmospheric electricity'. It includes thorough studies of a number of papers published in the 1890's: an occasional critical comment or extension of the argument is identified by the initials C T R W and the work also includes some brief notes of his own.
He discusses a programme of work to be attempted (October 1898); this includes an attempt to measure the electric field at various heights in the atmosphere using a captive balloon, and a series of laboratory investigations on ions.
Of great interest is a note on the difference in the behaviour of ions moving vertically through a cloud according to the sign of the vertical field which polarizes the drops. This note appears to contain the germ of the process of selective ion capture which was published in 1929 as a theory of the early stages of a thunderstorm. |