Where does the candle wax go? –Dave, Vanessa, Jill, Susannah, and everyone else we know
Where do you think it goes? It burns, just like the logs in a fireplace. You evidently have the idea that candle wax is only there to hold the wick upright. On the contrary, the wax is the fuel for the flame, the wick being merely the conduit for drawing melted wax up by capillary attraction. Rapid oxidation (burning, for you civilians) scrambles the constituent elements of the wax and they recombine to produce, among other things, carbon dioxide and water vapor, which drift off into the void.
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Many people find the fact that burning produces water surprising. They shouldn’t. The great British scientist Michael Faraday used to do an annual lecture on the “chemical history of a candle” in which he would hold a flask full of ice above a candle flame. After a short time the flask would be covered with droplets of water, most of it newly manufactured by the burning candle. They say Faraday used to pack the house for this demonstration. How fortunate to live in an age when you didn’t have to compete with music videos.
Within a relatively short time, of course, typewriter engineering had improved sufficiently that jamming was no longer a major concern. But by then, the story goes, people were used to the QWERTY keyboard and we’ve been stuck with it ever since, even in the face of allegedly superior alternatives such as the Dvorak keyboard. Advocates say research proves the Dvorak is easy to learn and makes typing faster and more accurate. But it’s never made much headway because of the crushing power of standards, even stupid ones.
