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XXXIII.—On the Colours of the Soap-Bubble

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2013

David Brewster
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Extract

The phenomena and colours of the soap-bubble have been the subject of more frequent observation than any other facts in science. For nearly two centuries they have afforded amusement and instruction to the young, and have exercised the genius of the most distinguished philosophers. Hook and Newton ascribed the beautiful colours of the soap-bubble to the different degrees of thickness of the attenuated film, and this opinion has been implicitly adopted by every optical writer down to the present day. In the latest and best Treatise on Light, Sir John Herschel expresses the current theory more distinctly than others, when he says, “that the brilliant colours which appear on soap-bubbles consist of a regular succession of hues disposed in the same order, and determined, obviously not by any colour in the medium itself, in which they are formed, or on whose surfaces they appear, but solely by its greater or less thickness.…It is at first uniformly white, but as it grows thinner and thinner, by the subsidence of its particles, colours appear to begin at its top, where thinnest, which grow more and more vivid, and arrange themselves in beautiful horizontal zones about the highest point, as a centre.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , 1867 , pp. 491 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1867

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References

page 491 note * Birch's Hist. of the Royal Society, vol. iii. p. 29.

page 491 note † Optics, 3d edition, p. 187.

page 491 note ‡ Treatise on Light, § 633, p. 462.

page 491 note § Elements of Natural Philosophy, vol. i. p. 469, and plate xxx. fig. 448. The dark band in this figure does not exist.

page 491 note ║ “When a film of soapy water,” says Dr Young, “is stretched over a wine-glass, and placed in a vertical position, its upper edge becomes extremely thin, and apparently black, while the parts below are divided by horizontal lines into a series of coloured bands.”—Id. p. 468.

page 495 note * The order of these colours, as produced upon the upper hemisphere of the soap-bubble, is described by Sir Isaac Newton in his Optics, p. 188.

page 495 note † It is difficult to obtain a good concave film by dipping the cylindrical wine-glass into the soap solution. During the experiments of a whole day I never failed to obtain one, but with the same glass and similar solutions I cannot now produce one. A certain mode of producing them will be found in the following paper.

page 500 note * See the following paper.

page 503 note * After I had used this method of producing the three varieties of films, I found that M. Plateau had long ago discovered the relation between the size of two united soap-bubbles and the curvature of the film which separates them.