Table of Different Velocities

Abstract

IN reading over the interesting table of velocities drawn up by Mr. James Jackson, and published in NATURE to-day (p. 604), there is one item omitted, which the author may like to add to his list, viz. the rate at which detonation travels, as exemplified by a train of compressed gun-cotton. This has been computed by Abel and Nobel to be between 17,000 and 19,000 feet per second, or rather more than 200 miles in a minute. In Mr. Jackson's table, therefore, the detonation of gun-cotton would come in somewhere between the velocity of sound in water and the velocity of electricity.