The candle: why the wick does not burn away
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Faraday explains why a candle does not burn away down its side: the melted fuel collects in a cup at the top and puts out any flame that reaches it. Turn the candle upside down and the fuel floods the wick, so the flame goes out at once. He gave these talks at the Royal Institution in the winter of 1860 and 1861, where he was director of the laboratory.
Where this text comes fromThis is the answer to a question nobody thinks to ask: why does a candle not simply burn down its own side and collapse. The explanation is that the melted fuel puts the flame out, which means the cup of liquid at the top is not a by-product but the mechanism, and turning the candle over destroys it. Faraday builds the whole first lecture around that single insight, and the passage is where he states it plainly before demonstrating it.
What you might not noticeA candle is a self-regulating machine. Too much heat and the pool of liquid grows until it drowns the wick; too little and the fuel stops rising. The flame sits at the one size that keeps both from happening. Source
What it trainsNinety-one words across three sentences, with nine commas doing the dividing and one hyphen the only other mark in 451 characters. The clause structure is the difficulty: the first sentence states a fact, then interrupts itself to explain the fact, and the explanation is longer than the statement. Three capitals, none of them inside a sentence. The longest word, extinguishes, is twelve letters and arrives where the sentence is already at its most tangled.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1861, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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