104 ON THE EFFECT OF THE INTERNAL FRICTION OF FLUIDS
Long pendulum. Short pendulum,
k, by experiment.........0'64S 0*602
k, by theory...............0-631 0'600
difference + 0'017 + 0'002
The depth to which the spheres were immersed is not stated, but it was probably sufficient to render the effect of the free surface small, if not insensible. The vessel was three feet in diameter, and the water 10 inches deep, so that unless the spheres were suspended near the bottom, which is not likely to have been the case, the effect of the limitation of the fluid by the sides of the vessel must have been but trifling. The agreement of theory and observation, as will be seen, is very close.
67. In the same memoir which contains the experiments on disks, Coulomb has given the results of some experiments in which the disk immersed in the fluid was replaced by a long narrow cylinder, placed with its axis horizontal and its middle point in the prolongation of the axis of the vertical copper cylinder. In these experiments, the arcs did not decrease in geometric progression, as would have been the case if the resistance had varied as the velocity; but it was found that the results of observation could be satisfied by supposing the resistance to vary partly as the first power, and partly as the square of the velocity. In Coulomb's notation, 1 : 1 - m denotes the ratio in which the arc of oscillation would be altered after one oscillation, if the part of the resistance varying as the square of the velocity were destroyed. The several experiments performed with the same cylinder were found to be sufficiently satisfied by the formula deduced from the above-mentioned hypothesis respecting the resistance, when suitable numerical values were assigned to two disposable constants m and p, of which p related to the part of the resistance varying as the square of the velocity.
Conceive the cylinder divided into elementary slices by planes perpendicular to its axis. Let r be the distance of any slice from the middle point, 0 the angle between the actual and the mean positions of the axis, dF that part of the resistance experienced by the slice which varies as the first power of the velocity. Then calculating the resistance as if the element in question belonged