Abstract
Bubbles of gas when released in a liquid, at depths great compared to their diameters, on reaching the surface burst and eject droplets of the fluid into the air. Each bubble whose diameter is less than the critical value, on bursting simultaneously ejects many droplets. As many as seven droplets were observed for pure freshly‐surfaced water at 21°C for bubbles less than 0.12 cm in diameter, for benzene as many as four at 22°C when bubble diameters were less than 0.15 cm. For the same diameters maximum heights of 14.0 cm and 9.0 cm were found for water and benzene. Bubbles having diameters less than 0.10 cm eject droplets to heights which are proportional to the three‐halves power of the radius. Bubbles having greater diameters than those mentioned as critical, burst with less regularity, but always project larger droplets to lesser heights as the diameter increases. This irregularity is attributed to instability of the rising bubble. The height distribution h of the droplets at any single explosion is found to vary with the number n so that log h decreases proportionally as n increases. If a large number of droplets at a given height is examined for variation in distribution it is found that a sharp lower boundary exists but a more straggling distribution for the larger values of height. An analysis shows this to be approximately a Maxwellian distribution. The bursting bubble is accompanied by a gas vortex ring ejection, which assists in raising a liquid jet and stretching it beyond its stable configuration until it breaks into the exponentially distributed droplets mentioned above. After integrating this exponential drop distribution with respect to the integral number of drops observable it was found that the reconstructed jet had the form hx2=constant. Because of the microscopic form of the jet no quantitative measurements could be made so that the converse case was considered, namely the jet produced by the reaction of a falling drop on a liquid surface, as presented by the photographic results obtained by Worthington. His jets when analysed as to volume gave the same mathematical expression as the one found from the data cited above. This reconstructed picture is offered as the solution of the mechanics of effervescence.

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