Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, on ventilation, warming and transmission of sound / abbreviated, with notes, by W.S. Inman.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee on Ventilation, Sound, etc.
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Committee of the House of Commons, on ventilation, warming and transmission of sound / abbreviated, with notes, by W.S. Inman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    the northern seas in the spring of that year, and carried into the Atlantic, and the almost total absence of ice in 1818 produced that warmth and dryness felt through the winter, not only in Great Britain and the northern parts of Europe, but also along the coast of America. In the depth of that winter the Baltic was unfrozen, the bays of Newfoundland were free from ice; and even to the middle of Ap ril there had been neither ice nor snow in Iceland,—a circumstance which had not happened before in the memory of man. This was probably owing to long continued southerly winds fixing; the ice in the Arctic seas. 3. Lieutenant, now Captain Sir Edward Parry, R.N., mea- sured an ice mountain 367 feet high, and more than two miles square : its weight by measurement was 1,292,397,673 tons, and it was capable of covering a space of 1750 square miles, one foot in thickness : the approach southward, and melting of such a mass, must influence the temperature and movement of the atmosphere. 4. Some recorded observations on the temperature of the sea in Capt. (now Sir John) Ross's first Polar voyage, are very remarkable. It seems that in Baffin's Bay, generally speaking, the temperature decreases with the depth. In lat. 71° 24. at 1008 fathoms, the temperature was 8f; at the surface 36°; and whenever the depth exceeded 100 fathoms, the thermometer generally descended to 30° or lower, when it was 34° or 35° at the surface. Near Cape Walsingham, at the depth of 660 fathoms, the thermometer came up 25*° 400 . 28° 200 . . . .29° 100 .. 30° Temperature of air being .... 37° It would be difficult to explain why the sea remained in the state of water at 25f° Fahrenheit.*—Did the pressure of the column of water prevent its freezing ? or was the water more strongly impregnated with salt ? * Walker cooled water to 10 Fahrenheit without freezing it.—rhilos. Trails. 1788.