St. Paul daily globe., 1895-12-15

have drawn hundreds OF sun spots,
and the works which 1 have publish
ed have been illustrated with my own
drawings of them"
LOOK AT A SUN SPOT.
At this point Of the conversation
Secretary Langley had one of these
former drawings of a sun spot laid
| upon the table. 1t was, in fact, q
beautiful painting about 12X14 inches
in size, of what seemed to be snowy
surface, with a large black area in
| the middle, crossed by strange lines
Of light, blending in fantastic out
lines like the frost figures on pane
| of glass.
That" said he, 'is a spot which
saw in 1878. 1t remained about twen-
ty minutes in the field of the tele-
scope, and it looks just as I saw it.
You notice all around it is white.
| The sun does not look like a ball or
fire when you see it in the telescope.
| 1t appears more frozen than hot. 1t;
looks much like the molten white
. iron in a great pudding furnace.
|
! drawing, nor can you appreciate it's
size. That spot which 1 have there
| drawn was so big that the earth
could have been dropped into it with
out touching the sides. Each of those
| bright gossamer-like threads is
! about 5000 miles long, and that spot
! covered more than a thousand mil
Gn,, villas Of "a c1Iro'C fana
1t had an area five times that of the
whole surface of the earth. A little
edge of it broke up and dissolved
while I looked at it, which was big
ger than the whole United States. 1t
was all in motion, and it's Seething
| particles were flying about at the
! rate of fifty miles second along the,
J surface, under which 1 could see
| probably some thousands Of miles
into the darkness below, up from
which came volumes of intensely
heated Whirling vapor."
Glow could you look at the sun so
long, Mr.. Langley, wothout hurting
your eyes?"
81 could not have done it," was the
reply, had I used nothing but my
eyes. had first to invent an instru-
ment to take the place of the incom
i plete means used by Sir William
Herschel in order to see the sun by
reflection. The rays come to the focus
of the telescope in binding bright
ness, producing a heat sufficient to
melt iron, but these rays have sides
to them, and by mirrors placed at
different angles they can be so re-
flected that there is no more heat and
light than 1 choose to have. I have
gazed at the sun for five hours at
stretch with this instrument, and
have felt no more fatigue than 1
would have felt from reading a
book"
SUMS HEAT FORCE.
"How about the heat of the sun,
Mr.. Langley? Can you give me some
idea of it?"
Putting it briefly, it is enormous
beyond conception, for there is
enough to warm two thousand mill
lion worlds like ours, and every min
ute there is enough Of the suns heat
falling on the earth to raise to boil
ing thirty-seven thousand million
tons of water. But this heat which
falls on the earth is not thousandth
part of 1 per cent of what the sun
sends elsewhere, and all the coal beds
of Pennsylvania, for instance, though
they can supply the country for hum
dreds of years, would not keep up
this heat during the one-thousandth
part of a second. Now, when you
| think that these enormous figures
are not exaggerations, but within
| the truth, you have to give up the
idea of grasping the amount of the
suns heat as inconceivable.'
"WiI we ever be able to use this
| heat mechanically?
'"That remains to be seen. The
| force is there. The method of pre-
serving and applying it economically
has yet to be invented. My expert
ments on Mount Whitney in the Sier-
ra Nevadas showed that if we could
save it all and use it for our steam
engines it would give about a horse
| ~
| ground. We hear a great deal about
| the immense power from the recent
utilization of Niagara, but the sun
power which is, so to speak, wasted
daily on this little District of CO.
lumbia, is hundreds and hundreds of
times as great. The heat on the sur
face of the island of Manhattan or
that occupied by London could at
; noontide drive all the steam engines
,, of the world So far there have been
no practical inventions for utilization
of this enormous power. At the Par
is exposition of 1878 there was a re-
fector which drove a steam engine
which worked a printing press. Erics-
son made solar engine which it was