Word: spectrograms
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...being pounded to splinters by Drs. Donald H. Menzel of Harvard Observatory and J. C. Boyce of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1869 the light of the sun's spectacular corona, trapped in spectroscopes during the scant seconds of a total eclipse, has produced on the spectrogram five mysterious bright lines. Astronomers deduced that the corona, though mostly scattered sunlight, was partly self-luminous. What element made it so? Not knowing, they called it "coronium." As recently as last year, in a standard work on eclipses, "coronium" was treated with respect. The Menzel-Boyce report unmasks it as mostly...
...three speeds at which definite vibrations developed. The balls representing the atoms moved over paths of a pattern characteristic for each speed. To the delight of Messrs. Kettering, Andrews & Shutts, the relation of the speeds to one another coincided almost exactly with the relation of vibration lines in the spectrogram of water. Thereupon they built "molecules" of benzene, toluene, carbon tetrachloride and methane and found that they worked almost exactly according to current atomic theory, thereby confirming that theory mechanically and giving instructors beautifully precise tools for classroom exposition...