Capillary Forces on Partially Immersed Plates

Abstract

Writings describing the floating of objects on a liquid surface date from long prior to the starting year of the currently accepted calendar. About 350 bc Aristoteles described observations of objects that sink when fully submerged in water but which nevertheless can be made to float at the water surface. That is in striking contrast to the requirements for floating formulated by his countryman Archimedes during the following century, which specifically exclude such behavior. Two thousand years later the French physicist and priest Mariotte (1620–1684) observed and attempted [1] to explain the remarkable tendency of two floating balls either to attract or repel each other. In retrospect it cannot be surprising that the attempted explanations were at once incomplete and inconsistent; it is now generally accepted that such phenomena are closely linked with surface tension, the concept of which was initially introduced over half a century following Mariotte’s decease. And an adequate description could hardly be feasible without the Calculus, which may well not have been accessible to that thinker during his lifetime.