It will doubtless interest readers of Nature to know that other elements besides neon (see Nature for November 27, p. 334) have now been analysed in the positive-ray spectrograph[1] with remarkable results. So far oxygen, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, neon, hydrochloric acid, and phosgene have been admitted to the bulb, in which, in addition, there are usually present other hydrocarbons (from wax, etc.) and mercury.
Of the elements involved hydrogen has yet to be investigated; carbon and oxygen appear, to use the terms suggested by Paneth, perfectly "pure"; neon, chlorine, and mercury are unquestionably "mixed." Neon, as has been already pointed out, consists of isotopic elements of atomic weights 20 and 22. The mass-spectra obtained when chlorine is present cannot be treated in detail here, but they appear to prove conclusively that this element consists of at least two isotopes of atomic weights 35 and 37. Their elemental nature is confirmed by lines corresponding to double charges at 17.50 and 18.50, and further supported by lines corresponding to two compounds HCl at 36 and 38, and in the case of phosgene to two compounds COCl at 63 and 65. In each of these pairs the line corresponding to the smaller mass has three or four times the greater intensity.
Mercury, the parabola of which was used as a standard of mass in the earlier experiments, now proves to be a mixture of at least three or four isotopes grouped in the region around 200. Several, if not all, of these are capable of carrying three, four, five, or even more charges. Accurate values of their atomic weights cannot yet be given.
A fact of the greatest theoretical interest appears to underlie these results, namely, that of more than forty different values of atomic and molecular mass so far measured, all, without a single exception, fall on whole numbers, carbon and oxygen being taken as 12 and 16 exactly, and due allowance being made for multiple charges.
Should this integer relation prove general, it should do much to elucidate the ultimate structure of matter. On the other hand, it seems likely to make a satisfactory distinction between the different atomic and molecular particles which may give rise to the same line on a mass-spectrum a matter of considerable difficulty.
F. W. Aston
Cavendish Laboratory, December 6.
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