A pair of contact springs are slowly shifted over so as to close the circuit at successive assigned instants during a complete phase.
Delisle is chiefly remembered as the author of a method for observing the transits of Venus and Mercury by instants of contacts.
For instance, to take the two solutions to which we have already referred, we have of ions between molecules at the instants of molecular collision only; during the rest of the life of the ions they were regarded as linked to each other to form electrically neutral molecules.
In 1887 Svante Arrhenius, professor of physics at Stockholm, put forward a new theory which supposed that the freedom of the opposite ions from each other was not a mere momentary freedom at the instants of molecular collision, but a more or less permanent freedom, the ions moving independently of each other through the liquid.
If, instead of considering one point in a succession of instants, we consider a succession of points along the line of propagation at the same instant, we evidently have waves of amplitude varying from 2a down to o, and then up to 2a again in distance U/(ni - n2).