. The Bell System technical journal . roplets stand apart. This separation wasachieved by letting half a second elapse from the instant when theelectron shot through, to the instant when by expansion the gas ofthe chamber grew suddenly cool and the water-vapor suspended in thegas condensed itself as dewdrops on the ions. These ions, formed bythe passage of the electron, had been diffusing through the gas duringthe half-second intervening, and the diffusion-process had served inthe main to carry them apart (though there must also have been casesof ions approaching and possibly even combining wi
. The Bell System technical journal . roplets stand apart. This separation wasachieved by letting half a second elapse from the instant when theelectron shot through, to the instant when by expansion the gas ofthe chamber grew suddenly cool and the water-vapor suspended in thegas condensed itself as dewdrops on the ions. These ions, formed bythe passage of the electron, had been diffusing through the gas duringthe half-second intervening, and the diffusion-process had served inthe main to carry them apart (though there must also have been casesof ions approaching and possibly even combining with each other).The counting of these droplets is germane to the question as to whetherthe traversing particle was or was not an electron. This question,however, we leave till later, and turn to photographs in which thedroplets of the tracks lie close together and are uncountable, becausethe expansion took place before there had been time for much so formed have the advantage of sharpness over what theylose in Fig. 2—^Track of a particle, presumably a mesotron, traversing a metal plate withoutsensible deflection. (Auger; Universite de Paris) Figure 2 presents the track of a particle which traversed a plate oflead as it shot across the chamber. In passing through the lead, itunderwent no sensible deflection; no other particle sprang from thelead; and there is nothing in the aspect of the track which differs onthe two sides of the metal. It would be more impressive yet to presenta similar picture for a particle traversing ten or fifty centimetres oflead, but here the practical limitations on the size of a Wilson chamberdefeat the physicist, or at any rate no one has overcome them has lately circumvented them by the laborious scheme ofsetting up two Wilson chambers, one above the other, with as much as9 cm. of lead or gold between them. However, the passage of single 194 BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL charged particles through thicknesses as
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