The salt finger experiments of Jevons (1857) and Rayleigh (1880)

Abstract

Over a century before Melvin Stern discovered salt fingers, W. Stanley Jevons performed the first salt finger experiment in an attempt to model cirrus clouds. Lord Rayleigh became aware of these experiments more than two decades later. Here newly discovered evidence is presented that Rayleigh repeated the Jevons experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in April 1880. The results led him to initiate the study of buoyancy effects in fluids by formulating several stability problems for a stratified, but nondiffusive, fluid. -from Author