Many substances have three forms--solid, liquid, and gaseous. It takes
cold to change a gas to a liquid, and more cold to reduce the liquid to
a solid. Steam, water, and ice are good examples.
Air is a substance that requires so much cold to reduce it even to a
liquid state that we know nothing of it as a solid. Our Smithsonian
Institution gave Professor Dewar of the Royal Institute of London a
gold medal for his discovery in regard to reducing it to a liquid.
No artificial cold is intense enough to affect air except when it is
confined under great pressure. When a gas is compressed and made cold
it tends to liquefy. But it takes enormous pressure and intense cold to
make liquid air.
It is a grayish substance that may be carried about like water. It has
a tendency to steam up, and when its vapor comes into contact with
flesh a cooling sensation is produced. But living flesh cannot long
remain in contact with the liquid itself. It produces a wound much like
a burn.
By careful use of liquid air in surgery, the flesh may be so put to
sleep that the surgeon's knife is not felt by the patient as he watches
the cutting. A cancer has been cut out by liquid air in a sort of
burning process that needed no knife. Cremation has been accomplished
by its use.
Cremation is burning. Burning is the union of oxygen with the substance
consumed. Liquid air left exposed to common air evaporates and sends
out its nitrogen so that almost pure liquid oxygen is left in the
vessel. This placed in contact with the body to be consumed soon sends
all except its mineral parts flying away in the atmosphere in a vapor
thinner than smoke.
It is the coldest substance known. It takes an intense cold to produce
it, and it has to remain cold much as ice is cold, only very much more
so, as long as it is liquid air. For this reason it is carried about
in vessels constructed so as to exclude the heat. Mercury dropped into
it becomes a solid block, and meat quickly freezes so hard that it is
brittle as glass and may be broken into a thousand pieces.
The liquid oxygen left after exposure of liquid air may be placed in a
hollow in a cake of ice. Dip into it a watch spring and touch a lighted
match to it and you will see the steel spring burn as if it were full
of pitch.
Eight hundred gallons of common air are compressed into one gallon of
the liquid. The liquid is unattractive and very common-looking. You
would not suspect its great powers by merely looking at it in a dish.
But when it expands into common air it has tremendous energy. A few
drops confined in a closed iron pipe will explode and blow the metal to
atoms.
When first produced it was so expensive a product that its value
was above that of rubies. Now it is cheap and becoming more so. We
expect it to become an ordinary article of commerce. One company is
capitalized at $10,000,000 to push its use in place of steam and
electricity.
Probably some of the companies advertising shares to sell are putting
its powers far too high. One company's agents are representing that a
very little of it in a cup will keep an icebox cold all day, and that a
pound of it will reduce the heat in a large house on a warm summer day
so that it may be kept cool at very small expense.
These extravagant claims are probably made for the purpose of deceiving
people so they will buy shares. The facts seem to show that a pint of
liquid air will not cool an ice box much more than will a pound of ice.
The effect of a gallon of it in a large house would scarcely be felt in
July, except for a short time in one or two rooms.