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5. Note regarding an Experiment suggested by Professor Robison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2015

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Extract

In his memoir of Dr Chalmers, lately read to this Society, Mr Ramsay has referred to an experiment which Dr Chalmers was anxious to have performed on the tide-wave in the Bay of Fundy. The object was to determine the earth's density by the attraction of the tide-wave on a plummet or spirit-level, on the same principle as Maskelyne's experiment on Schiehallion, but with the superior advantages arising from the perfect homogeneity of the attracting mass, and from the circumstance that all the observations might be made at a single station. The experiment might, in short, appear to unite the advantages both of Maskelyne's and Cavendish's methods of determining the earth's density.

Type
Proceedings 1848-49
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1850

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References

page 245 note * The micrometric observation of a plumb-line, as in a zenith sector, would be sufficient; or, as Professor Smyth has suggested to me, the view of the wires of a transit instrument, with a collimating eye-piece, as reflected in a mercury trough, —an observation, the accuracy of which may, he states, be brought within of a second.