I wish now to dwell upon that beautiful contrivance the modern skate. It is a remarkable example of how an appliance can develop towards perfection in the absence of a really intelligent understanding of the principles underlying its development. For what are the principles underlying the proper construction of the skate? After what I have said, I think you will readily understand. The object is to produce such a pressure under the blade that the ice will melt. We wish to establish such a pressure under the skate that even on a day when the ice is below zero, its melting
point is so reduced just under the edge of the skate that the ice turns to water.
It is this melting of the ice under the skate which secures the condition essential to skating. In the first place, the skate no longer rests on a solid. It rests on a liquid. You are aware how in cases where we want to reduce friction--say at the bearing of a wheel or under a pivot--we introduce a liquid. Look at the bearings of a steam engine. A continuous stream of oil is fed in to interpose itself between the solid surfaces. I need not illustrate so well-known a principle by experiment. Solid friction disappears when the liquid intervenes. In its place we substitute the lesser difficulty of shearing one layer of the liquid over the other; and if we keep up the supply of oil the work required to do this is not very different, no matter how great we make the pressure upon the bearings. Compared with the resistance of solid friction, the resistance of fluid friction is trifling. Here under the skate the lubrication is perhaps the most perfect which it is possible to conceive. J. Müller has determined the coefficient by towing a skater holding on by a spring balance. The coefficient is between 0.016 and 0.032. In other words, the skater would run down an incline so little as 1 or 2 degrees; an inclination not perceivable by the eye. Now observe that the larger of these coefficients is almost exactly the same as that which Perry found in the case of well-greased surfaces. But evidently no
artificial system of lubrication could hope to equal that which exists between the skate and the ice. For the lubrication here is, as it were, automatic. In the machine if the lubricant gets squeezed out there instantly ensues solid friction. Under the skate this cannot happen for the squeezing out of the lubricant is instantly followed by the formation of another film of water. The conditions of pressure which may lead to solid friction in the machine here automatically call the lubricant into existence.