"The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

when it came. Another took two loud sounds and out of them made a
silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant
lights.*(4) Another made ice in a red-hot furnace.*(5) Another
directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did.*(6) Another
took this luminary with the moon and the planets, and having first
weighed them with scrupulous accuracy, probed into their depths and
found out the solidity of the substance of which they were made. But
the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a necromantic ability,
that not even their infants, nor their commonest cats and dogs have
any difficulty in seeing objects that do not exist at all, or that for
twenty millions of years before the birth of the nation itself had
been blotted out from the face of creation."'*(7)

* Voltaic pile.
*(2) The Electro Telegraph Printing Apparatus.
*(3) The Electro telegraph transmits intelligence instantaneously-
at least at so far as regards any distance upon the earth.
*(4) Common experiments in Natural Philosophy. If two red rays
from two luminous points be admitted into a dark chamber so as to fall
on a white surface, and differ in their length by 0.0000258 of an
inch, their intensity is doubled. So also if the difference in
length be any whole-number multiple of that fraction. A multiple by
2 1/4, 3 1/4, &c., gives an intensity equal to one ray only; but a
multiple by 2 1/2, 3 1/2, &c., gives the result of total darkness.
In violet rays similar effects arise when the difference in length
is 0.000157 of an inch; and with all other rays the results are the
same- the difference varying with a uniform increase from the violet
to the red.
Analogous experiments in respect to sound produce analogous results.
*(5) Place a platina crucible over a spirit lamp, and keep it a
red heat; pour in some sulphuric acid, which, though the most volatile
of bodies at a common temperature, will be found to become
completely fixed in a hot crucible, and not a drop evaporates- being
surrounded by an atmosphere of its own, it does not, in fact, touch
the sides. A few drops of water are now introduced, when the acid,
immediately coming in contact with the heated sides of the crucible,
flies off in sulphurous acid vapor, and so rapid is its progress, that
the caloric of the water passes off with it, which falls a lump of ice
to the bottom; by taking advantage of the moment before it is
allowed to remelt, it may be turned out a lump of ice from a red-hot
vessel.
*(6) The Daguerreotype.
*(7) Although light travels 167,000 miles in a second, the
distance of 61 Cygni (the only star whose distance is ascertained)
is so inconceivably great, that its rays would require more than ten
years to reach the earth. For stars beyond this, 20- or even 1000
years- would be a moderate estimate. Thus, if they had been
annihilated 20, or 1000 years ago, we might still see them to-day by
the light which started from their surfaces 20 or 1000 years in the
past time. That many which we see daily are really extinct, is not