Featured on PDR in the collection The Splash of a Drop (1895)

The transcript of a “Discourse” given at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1894, this short text is a delightful study of the physics and aesthetics of splashing drops — phenomena familiar to “any drinker of afternoon tea”. Crediting a “school-boy at Rugby” with making the initial observation “some twenty years ago”, A. M. Worthington describes how fallen drops of mercury, alcohol, and water may appear to be “lying unbroken” but have actually taken part in “violent exercise”, the traces of which can be glimpsed on opaque glass. Examining these traces, which he calls “footprints of the dance”, leads the scientist to wonderfully minute ends: