But the physicist has another resource. He may place the cylinder of gas in a cold medium, so that the heat vibrations sent into it will be less vigorous than those it sends out. That is a blow the molecule cannot withstand. It is quite impotent to cease sending out the impulses however little comes in return; hence the aggregate motion becomes less and less active, until finally the molecule is moving so sluggishly that when it collides with its fellow cohesion is able to hold it there. Cohesion, then, has won the battle, and the gas has become a liquid.
Such, stated in terms of the mechanical theory of heat, is what is brought to pass when a gas is liquefied in the laboratory of the physicist. It remains only to note that different chemical substances show the widest diversity as to the exact point of temperature at which this balance of the expansive and cohesive tendencies is affected, but that the point, under uniform conditions of pressure, is always the same for the same substance. This diversity has to do pretty clearly with the size of the individual molecules involved; but its exact explanation is not yet forthcoming, and, except in a general way, the physicist would not be able to predict the "critical temperature" of any new gas presented to him. But once this has been determined by experiment, he always knows just what to expect of any given substance. He knows, for example, that in a mixture of gases hydrogen would still remain gaseous after all the others had assumed the liquid state, and most of them the solid state as well.
These mechanical conceptions well in mind, it is clear that what the would-be liquefier of gases has all along sought to attain is merely the insulation of the portion of matter with which he worked against the access of heat-impulse from its environment. It is clear that were any texture known which would permit a heat-impulse to pass through it in one direction only, nothing more would be necessary than to place a portion of gas in such a receptacle of this substance, so faced as to permit egress but not entrance of the heat, and the gas thus enclosed, were it hydrogen itself, would very soon become liquid and solid, through spontaneous giving off of its energy, without any manipulation whatever. Contrariwise, were the faces of the receptacle reversed, a piece of iron placed within it would be made red-hot and melted though the receptacle were kept packed in salt and ice and no heat applied except such as came from this freezing mixture. One could cook a beefsteak with a cake of ice had he but such a material as this with which to make his stove. Not even Rumford or our modern Edward Atkinson ever dreamed of such economy of fuel as that.