dispenses with the difficulty of making accurate measurement of the deviation produced. After obtaining the value of the index by the method described above, I wished to see whether it was not possible to obtain fairly good results by measuring the angle of refraction corresponding to a given angle of incidence. I shall presently describe the difficulties met with in these experiments, and the manner in which they were to a great extent removed.
The preliminary experiment was carried out with a single semi-cylinder. The angle of incidence was gradually increased by rotating the cylinder, and the refracted beam was followed with the receiver. In this way it was found that the rays ceased to be refracted when the angle of incidence was about 28° 30′. The critical angle is therefore 28° 30′ and
I next used two semi-cylinders. The plane vertical face of the first semi-cylinder was placed along a diameter of the spectrometer circle. The second semi-cylinder was separated from the first by an air-space 2 cm. in breadth. The plane surfaces of the two semi-cylinders were thus separated by a parallel air-space; the first semi-cylinder rendered the beam parallel, and the second focussed the rays on the receiver placed opposite the radiator. With the radiator used, I found a thickness of 2 cm. of air-space to be more than sufficient for total reflection of the incident ray.[1]
On rotating the cylinders to the right and to the left, two positions for total reflection were obtained. The
- ↑ Vide the following paper "On the Influence of the Thickness of Air-space on Total Reflection of Electric Radiation."
