Blondlot: central claims

Source note (revised after QE). The folder holds one document, a Google Books scan of the 1905 English translation of "N" Rays (161 pages). The scan has no native text layer (only Google's boilerplate), but Step 0 OCR'd 160 pages into about 201,000 characters that read well, so the text is available. Coverage: all of it digested; PDF pp.54-111 deep-read; PDF pp.16-17, 22-29 and 36-40 read directly from the OCR text; the earlier Step 1 pass also read the body from page images (the wavelength table on PDF p.83 from the image). Still missing from the folder: the original French Comptes Rendus notes, the 1902 X-ray velocity notes (C.R. t.125), Wood's 1904 Nature report, Rubens's own report, and any replication or critique papers. Statements about Wood's test, Rubens's tests and other replications rest on [web] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray) and [memory], not on the folder.

1. Blondlot's spark-gap observations show that "X" rays from a focus tube are plane-polarized (bright when the gap is parallel to the cathode rays, absent when perpendicular), and that quartz and sugar rotate the plane by about 40 degrees; he later re-assigned these results to a separate radiation, N rays. His earlier velocity measurements, likewise re-assigned, are said to give the speed of light (stated in the Preliminary Notice, with no data in the book).
2. Many ordinary sources (Auer burner, Nernst lamp, flames, the sun, strained steel) emit N rays, which pass metals, wood and black paper (copper even at 65 cm) but are stopped by water, wet paper, platinum and rock salt.
3. N rays behave like light: they are refracted (quartz lens indices 2.93, 2.942, 2.62, 2.436, 2.29), reflected, diffused, dispersed by an aluminium prism into indices 1.04 to 1.85, and diffracted by gratings; a second species, N1, acts inversely. (QE: the one printed lens pair, l = 26.5 cm and l' = 13.9 cm, does not reproduce the quoted 2.93; it gives a quartz index near 1.72, and the other pairs are not printed.)
4. N rays have wavelengths of roughly 0.008 to 0.018 (unit not printed in the extracted text; presumably micrometres, i.e. 8-18 nm), much shorter than visible light, with wavelength rising with index, measured to within 4 per cent (Blondlot concedes he cannot state the approximation with certainty).
5. N rays are detected as a small increase in glow of a spark, flame or dim phosphorescent surface (seen normally; decreased when seen tangentially), observed by the unaided eye under special viewing rules; Blondlot admits that observers differ and that an audience could not be shown the effect.
6. Bricks, stones, sea water, metals and ox eyes store N rays after sun exposure, and compressed or strained bodies emit them indefinitely (a Gallo-Roman knife after twelve centuries).
7. The spark's brightening under N rays can be recorded photographically (about forty experiments, one failure, unnamed witnesses), offered as an objective check on the eye; the rays themselves have no photographic action and no heating effect on a thermopile.

Replication note: the book names Nancy colleagues who reported related effects (Bichat, Charpentier, Gutton, Macé de Lépinay); Rubens is cited only through an ambiguous private letter, and Sagnac proposed a conflicting wavelength reading. None of these gives independent numbers.