Why Iron Seems Colder Than Wood

4.8

When we touch a cold or a hot thing, our feeling does not always depend on how cold or hot the thing really is. The pen and the pencil on your table are both of the same temperature, but the pen seems to you much colder than the pencil. All the parts of a hammer are of the same temperature, but the iron part of it seems much colder than the wooden part.

In all these cases the thing which we touch is colder than our skin. So the heat goes from our skin into that thing. Our feeling depends on the fact how quickly the thing takes heat from our fingers.

Iron takes heat quickly from our fingers; it makes our fingers cold, and so we say that it is cold. But wood does not take heat away so quickly from our fingers, and we say it is not so cold.

So we must say that iron is a good conductor of heat, and wood is a bad conductor.