Re: Paschen paper online

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net> 

At 11:19 AM 2/25/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Original poster: "Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz" <acmq-at-compuland-dot-com.br>
>Tesla list wrote:
>
> > Original poster: "Christopher Boden" <chrisboden-at-hotmail-dot-com>
> >
> > http://www.thegeekgroup-dot-org/archives/paschen.htm
> >
> > For all of you courtesy of The Geek Group.
>
>Nice. Thank you for the work. There are some strange phrases here and
>there, but I know from experience what happens when one tries to
>translate
>these old papers. If we set up a "reviewing" process the
>translation will be perfect quickly. Someone could start by figuring
>out what is the unit used for voltages.
>
>Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz

I've got the first page fairly well cleaned up and I'll send it off to Chris.


I'm going to guess abvolts, ESU, or something like that.  Paschen refers to 
using the Righi electrometer to make measurements over the range 3-90 
electrostatic absolute CGSunits.  He uses the phrase electrostatic absolute 
CGS-unit a lot in connection with potential difference.  The problem is 
that an abvolt is 1E-8 Volts, and was really a 20th century word. ESU is 
charge, so that's a problem, because it's the wrong kind of unit.  CGS was 
promulgated in 1870s

perhaps the "Statvolt" = 299.792458 volts

Perhaps we can use a known spark gap voltage (from the standard sphere gap 
tables) and relate it?

For instance, on page 77, he gives electrometer readings related to 
voltages for gaps of 0.2, 0.4, and 0.7 cm for 1cm radius spheres.  The 
potentials are given as 27.83, 49.74, and 79.32, respectively.

Page 78 discusses calibration of the electrometer.

It looks like gaps of 0.1 cm between 2cm diameter spheres have a breakdown 
voltage of around 15 whatevers...  That's pretty close to the uniform gap 
situation, so I'd expect an actual breakdown of around 3 kV.  If the V in 
Paschen is statvolts, 15 statvolts = about 4.5 kV.