Experiment, according to him and others, establishes in the most
conclusive manner that no trace of electricity can pass through a
liquid compound without producing its equivalent decomposition.[2]
Faraday has now got fairly entangled amid the chemical phenomena of
the pile, and here his previous training under Davy must have been
of the most important service to him. Why, he asks, should
decomposition thus take place?--what force is it that wrenches the
locked constituents of these compounds asunder? On the 20th of June,
1833, he read a paper before the Royal Society 'On Electro-chemical
Decomposition,' in which he seeks to answer these questions.
The notion had been entertained that the poles, as they are called,
of the decomposing cell, or in other words the surfaces by which the
current enters and quits the liquid, exercised electric attractions
upon the constituents of the liquid and tore them asunder. Faraday
combats this notion with extreme vigour. Litmus reveals, as you
know, the action of an acid by turning red, turmeric reveals the
action of an alkali by turning brown. Sulphate of soda, you know,
is a salt compounded of the alkali soda and sulphuric acid.
The voltaic current passing through a solution of this salt so
decomposes it, that sulphuric acid appears at one pole of the
decomposing cell and alkali at the other. Faraday steeped a piece
of litmus paper and a piece of turmeric paper in a solution of
sulphate of soda: placing each of them upon a separate plate of
glass, he connected them together by means of a string moistened
with the same solution.
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