Bibliography

E. v.-Angerer. Technische Kunstgriffe bei physikalischen Untersuchungen. Sammlung Vieweg H. 71. SS. VIII + 116. Vieweg, Braunschweig. 1924.

E. Ph.-Angerer. Technical devices in physical investigations.

A rare physicist who has spent a long time engaged in experiment has not developed for himself a series of techniques or tricks in setting up, making, or repairing instruments, and so forth, which to a considerable degree have determined the success of his work. Often these are such simple things that it is not customary to write about them in a brief printed report on the work, and the technique that has been developed remains the author’s personal possession, or is disseminated only within the walls of the given laboratory. On the other hand, if a recipe or technique has been described in print, then in many cases it is extremely difficult to find it at the needed moment; it remains a secret of library shelves. Extensive handbooks on physical technique usually set themselves tasks that are too broad and cannot enter into a detailed description of the particulars of the methods in question. Therefore the appearance of any “recipe book” on the art of physical experiment is invariably met with success, provided only that its recipes are sufficiently complete and have actually been tested.

Angerer’s small book is written without any claim to systematic completeness. Pursuit of these two excellent qualities would have made the task impossible for one person, and the date of appearance of a collective work would probably have been postponed for many years. The book under consideration is valuable in that the material presented is to a considerable extent new and relates to new fields of research. Much of it has also been tried and verified personally by the author. The handbook is divided into 9 chapters: 1) Joining parts of apparatuses (soldering, gluing). 2) Working glass. 3) Silvering glass. 4) Vacuum technique. 5) Thin plates, wires, and threads. 6) Insulators and high resistances. 7) Thermoelements. 8) Photographic recipes. 9) Various recipes. Very useful to many, probably, will be the chapter on vacuum technique and various observations, seemingly minor at first glance, on how, for example, to make thin short wires

for thermoelements (Pfund’s method), how to obtain thin celluloid films with a thickness of fractions of a micron, how to remove the gelatin layer from negatives without hot water, how a rheostat—speed regulator—should be inserted into a motor circuit, etc. Such information greatly facilitates experimental work. Angerer’s book belongs to that group of books with which the experimental physicist should not only become acquainted, but should always have at hand.

In this connection, the desire naturally arises for a Russian translation of this book, supplemented with other recipes and instructions; above all, valuable data from the well-known book by H. Abraham, A Collection of Elementary Experiments in Physics (Russian translation, 1905), and S. I. Pokrovsky’s article in Questions of Physics for 1915, p. 89, could be used.

C. Vavilov.