The earliest is that of Quincke, who coated a glass grating with a chemical silver deposit, subsequently thickened with copper in an electrolytic bath.
He did not, however, enter into the explanation of particular phenomena, as this had been done already by Laplace, but he pointed out to physicists the advantages of the method of Segner and Gay Lussac, afterwards carried out by Quincke, of measuring the dimensions of large drops of mercury on a horizontal or slightly concave surface, and those of large bubbles of air in transparent liquids resting against the under side of a horizontal plate of a substance wetted by the liquid.
The experiments of Quincke and others seem to show that the extreme range of the forces which produce capillary action lies between a thousandth and a twenty-thousandth part of a millimetre.
Marangoni, van der Mensbrugghe, Quincke, have all arrived at results inconsistent with the reality of Neumann's triangle.
The process described by Quincke is somewhat elaborate; but there is little difficulty in repeating the experiment if the mistake be avoided of using a free surface already contaminated, as almost inevitably happens when the mercury is poured from an ordinary bottle.