His
contemporaries, as may be gathered from the perusal of the treatises
on physics of that period, attached great importance to this
discovery; but, as it was somewhat inconvenient and did not readily
fit in with ordinary studies, it was in due course neglected, then
considered as insufficiently established, and finally wholly
forgotten.
All these somewhat obscure facts, and some others--such as the
different action of ultra-violet radiations on positively and
negatively charged bodies--are now, on the contrary, about to be
co-ordinated, thanks to the modern ideas on the mechanism of conduction;
while these ideas will also allow us to interpret the most striking
dissymmetry of all, i.e. that revealed by electrolysis itself, a
dissymmetry which certainly can not be denied, but to which sufficient
attention has not been given.
It is to a German physicist, Giese, that we owe the first notions on
the mechanism of the conductivity of gases, as we now conceive it. In
two memoirs published in 1882 and 1889, he plainly arrives at the
conception that conduction in gases is not due to their molecules, but
to certain fragments of them or to ions.
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