International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850

The Wilkinsons were having a small party,—it consisted of themselves and Uncle Bagges—at which the younger members of the family, home for the holidays, had been just admitted to assist after dinner. Uncle Bagges was a gentleman from whom his affectionate relatives cherished expectations of a testamentary nature. Hence the greatest attention was paid by them to the wishes of Mr. Bagges, as well as to every observation which he might be pleased to make.

"Eh! what? you sir," said Mr. Bagges, facetiously addressing himself to his eldest nephew, Harry,—"Eh! what? I am glad to hear, sir, that you are doing well at school. Now—eh? now, are you clever enough to tell where was Moses when he put the candle out?"

"That depends, uncle," said the young gentleman, "on whether he had lighted the candle to see with at night, or by daylight, to seal a letter."

"Eh! Very good, now! 'Pon my word, very good," exclaimed Uncle Bagges. "You must be Lord Chancellor, sir—Lord Chancellor, one of these days."

"And now, uncle," asked Harry, who was a favorite with his uncle, "can you tell me what you do when you put a candle out?"

"Clap an extinguisher on it, you young rogue, to be sure."

"Oh! but I mean, you cut off its supply of oxygen," said Master Harry.

"Cut off its ox's—eh? what? I shall cut off your nose, you young dog, one of these fine days."

"He means something he heard at the Royal Institution," observed Mrs. Wilkinson. "He reads a great deal about chemistry, and he attended Professor Faraday's lectures there on the chemical history of a candle, and has been full of it ever since."

"Now, you sir," said Uncle Bagges, "come you here to me, and tell me what you have to say about this chemical, eh?—or comical: which?—this comical chemical history of a candle."

"He'll bore you, Bagges," said Mr. Wilkinson. "Harry, don't be troublesome to your uncle."

"Troublesome! Oh, not at all. He amuses me. I like to hear him. So let him teach his old uncle the comicality and chemicality of a farthing rushlight."

"A wax candle will be nicer and cleaner, uncle, and answer the same purpose. There's one on the mantel-shelf. Let me light it.

"Take care you don't burn your fingers, Or set anything on fire," said Mrs. Wilkinson.

"Now, uncle," commenced Harry, having drawn his chair to the side of Mr. Bagges, "we have got our candle burning. What do you see?"

"Let me put on my spectacles," answered the uncle.

"Look down on the top of the candle around the wick. See, it is a little cup full of melted wax. The heat of the flame has melted the wax just round the wick. The cold air keeps the outside of it hard, so as to make the rim of it. The melted wax in the little cup goes up through the wick to be burnt, just as oil does in the wick of a lamp. What do you think makes it go up, uncle?"

"Why—why, the flame draws it up, doesn't it?"

"Not exactly, uncle. It goes up through little tiny passages in the cotton wick, because very, very small channels, or pipes, or pores, have the power in themselves of sucking up liquids. What they do it by is called cap—something."

"Capillary attraction, Harry," suggested Mr. Wilkinson.

"Yes, that's it; just as a sponge sucks up water, or a bit of lump-sugar the little drop of tea or coffee left in the bottom of a cup. But I mustn't say much more about this, or else you will tell me I am doing something very much like teaching my grandmother to—you know what."

"Your grandmother, eh, young sharp-shins?"

"No—I mean my uncle. Now, I'll blow the candle out, like Moses; not to be in the dark, though, but to see into what it is. Look at the smoke rising from the wick. I'll hold a bit of lighted paper in the smoke, so as not to touch the wick. But see, for all that, the candle lights again. So this shows that the melted wax sucked up through the wick is turned into vapor; and the vapor burns. The heat of the burning vapor keeps on melting more wax, and that is sucked up too within the flame, and turned into vapor, and burnt, and so on till the was is all used up, and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle, you see, is the last of the candle, and the candle seems to go through the flame into nothing—although it doesn't, but goes into several things, and isn't it curious, as Professor Faraday said, that the candle should look so splendid and glorious in going away?"

"How well he remembers, doesn't he?" observed Mrs. Wilkinson.

"I dare say," proceeded Harry, "that the flame of the candle looks flat to you; but if we were to put a lamp glass over it, so as to shelter it from the draught, you would see it is round,—round sideways and running up to a peak. It is drawn up by the hot air; you know that hot air always rises, and that is the way smoke is taken up the chimney. What should you think was in the middle of the flame?"

"I should say fire," replied Uncle Bagges.

"Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright flame we see is something no thicker than a thin peel, or skin; and it doesn't touch the wick. Inside of it is the vapor I told you of just now. If you put one end of a bent pipe into the middle of the flame, and let the other end of the pipe dip into a bottle, the vapor or gas from the candle will mix with the air there; and if you set fire to the mixture of gas from the candle and air in the bottle, it would go off with a bang."

"I wish you'd do that, Harry," said Master Tom, the younger brother of the juvenile lecturer.

"I want the proper things," answered Harry. "Well, uncle, the flame of the candle is a little shining case, with gas in the inside of it, and air on the outside, so that the case of flame is between the air and the gas. The gas keeps going into the flame to burn, and when the candle burns properly, none of it ever passes out through the flame; and none of the air ever gets in through the flame to the gas. The greatest heat of the candle is in this skin, or peel, or case of flame."

"Case of flame!" repeated Mr. Bagges. "Live and learn. I should have thought a candle-flame was as thick as my poor old noddle."

"I can show you the contrary," said Harry. "I take this piece of white paper, look, and hold it a second or two down upon the candle-flame, keeping the flame very steady. Now I'll rub off the black of the smoke, and—there—you find that the paper is scorched in the shape of a ring; but inside the ring it is only dirtied, and not singed at all."

"Seeing is believing," remarked the uncle.

"But," proceeded Harry, "there is more in the candle-flame than the gas that comes out of the candle. You know a candle won't burn without air. There must be always air around the gas, and touching it like, to make it burn. If a candle hasn't got enough air, it goes out, or burns badly, so that some of the vapor inside of the flame comes out through it in the form of smoke, and this is the reason of a candle smoking. So now you know why a great clumsy dip smokes more than a neat wax candle; it is because the thick wick of the dip makes too much fuel in proportion to the air that can get to it."

"Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a reason for everything," exclaimed the young philosopher's mamma.

"What should you say now," continued Harry, "if I told you that the smoke that comes out of a candle is the very thing that makes a candle light? Yes; a candle shines by consuming its own smoke. The smoke of a candle is a cloud of small dust, and the little grains of the dust are bits of charcoal, or carbon, as chemists call it. They are made in the flame, and burnt in the flame, and, while burning, make the flame bright. They are burnt the moment they are made; but the flame goes on making more of them as fast as it burns them: and that is how it keeps bright. The place they are made in, is in the ease of flame itself, where the strong heat is. The great heat separates them from the gas which conies from the melted wax, and, as soon as they touch the air on the outside of the thin case of flame, they burn."

"Can you tell how it is that the little bits of carbon came the brightness of the flame?" asked Mr. Wilkinson.

"Because they are pieces of solid matter," answered Harry. "To make a flame shine, there must always be some solid—or at least liquid-matter in it."

"Very good." said Mr. Bagges,—"solid stuff necessary to brightness."

"Some gases and other things," resumed Harry, "that burn with a flame you can hardly see, burn splendidly when something solid is put into them. Oxygen and hydrogen—tell me if I use too hard words, uncle—oxygen and hydrogen gases, if mixed together and blown through a pipe, burn with plenty of heat but with very little light. But if their flame is blown upon a piece of quick-lime, it gets so bright as to be quite dazzling, Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass through the same flame, and it gives the flame a beautiful brightness directly."

"I wonder," observed Uncle Bagges, "what has made you such a bright youth."

"Taking after uncle, perhaps," retorted his nephew. "Don't put my candle and me out. Well, carbon, or charcoal is what causes the brightness of all lamps, and candles, and other common lights; so, of course, there is carbon in what they are all made of."

"So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing to your carbon. Giving light out of smoke, eh? as they say in the classics," observed Mr. Bagges.

"But what becomes of the candle," pursued Harry, "as it burns away? where does it go?"

"Nowhere," said his mamma, "I should think. It burns to nothing."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Harry, "everything—everybody goes somewhere."

"Eh!—rather an important consideration, that," Mr. Bagges moralized.

"You can see it goes into smoke, which makes soot, for one thing," pursued Harry. "There are other things it goes into, not to be seen by only looking, but you can get to see them by taking the right means,—just put your hand over the candle, uncle."

"Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather be excused."

"Not close enough down to burn you, uncle; higher up. There—you feel a stream of hot air; so something seems to rise from the candle. Suppose you were to put a very long slender gas-burner over the flame, and let the flame burn just within the end of it, as if it were a chimney,—some of the hot steam would go up and come out at the top, but a sort of dew would be left behind in the glass chimney, if the chimney was cold enough when you put it on. There are ways of collecting this sort of dew, and when it is collected it turns out to be really water. I am not joking, uncle. Water is one of the things which the candle turns into in burning,—water coming out of fire. A jet of oil gives above a pint of water in burning. In some lighthouses they burn, Professor Faraday says, up to two gallons of oil in a night, and if the windows are cold the steam from the oil clouds the inside of the windows, and, in frosty weather, freezes into ice."

"Water out of a candle, eh?" exclaimed Mr. Bagges. "As hard to get, I should have thought, as blood out of a post. Where does it come from?"