Note 13 — Chapter I · ON WATER AND ITS COMPOUNDS

Fig. 13.—Drying oven, composed of brazed copper. It is heated by a lamp. The object to be dried is placed on the gauze inside the oven. The thermometer indicates the temperature.

In order to dry any substance at about 100°—that is, at the boiling point of water (hygroscopic water passes off at this temperature)—an apparatus called a ‘drying-oven’ is employed. It consists of a double copper box; water is poured into the space between the internal and external boxes, and the oven is then heated over a stove or by any other means, or else steam from a boiler is passed between the walls of the two boxes. When the water boils, the temperature inside the inner box will be approximately 100° C. The substance to be dried is placed inside the oven, and the door is closed. Several holes are cut in the door to allow the free passage of air, which carries off the aqueous vapour by the chimney on the top of the oven. Often, however, desiccation is carried on in copper ovens heated directly over a lamp (fig. 13). In this case any desired temperature may be obtained, which is determined by a thermometer fixed in a special orifice. There are substances which only part with their water at a much higher temperature than 100°, and then such air baths are very useful. In order to determine directly the amount of water in a substance which does not part with anything except water at a red heat, the substance is placed in a bulb tube. By first weighing the tube empty and then with the substance to be dried in it, the weight of the substance taken may be found. The tube is then connected on one side with a gas-holder full of air, which, on opening a stop-cock, passes first through a flask containing sulphuric acid, and then into a vessel containing lumps of pumice stone moistened with sulphuric acid. In passing through these vessels the air is thoroughly dried, having given up all its moisture to the sulphuric acid. Thus dry air will pass into the bulb tube, and as hygroscopic water is entirely given up from a substance in dry air even at the ordinary temperature, and still more rapidly on heating, the moisture given up by the substance in the tube will be carried off by the air passing through it. This damp air then passes through a U-shaped tube full of pieces of pumice stone moistened with sulphuric acid, which absorbs all the moisture given off from the substance in the bulb tube. Thus all the water expelled from the substance will collect in the U tube, and so, if this be weighed before and after, the difference will show the quantity of water expelled from the substance. If only water (and not any gases) come over, the increase of the weight of the U tube will be equal to the decrease in the weight of the bulb tube.