Some Factors Influencing the Ignition of Carbon Monoxide and Oxygen

In a recent article Professor W. A. Bone has shown that combination can take place between carbon monoxide and oxygen when dried over phosphorus pentoxide for six months, provided sufficient energy is added to the explosive mixture. The condensed discharges used by Professor Bone to ignite the dry mixture were of the order of magnitude of the hot sparks used by Millikan and Bowen in their experiments on stripped atoms, and were amply sufficient to dissociate the gas in the path of the spark into atoms stripped of their valence electrons