X-Ray Technique for Testing Materials. A collection of articles edited by D. Eggert and E. Schiebold. Translated from the German under the editorship of A. N. Zilberman, pp. 206. Price 5 rubles 50 kopecks. GTTI, 1933. (Series “Advances in Physics.”)

Bibliography

The book is a translation of the first volume of the series Ergebnisse der technischen Röntgenkunde, which appeared in Germany in 1930 and contains a number of reports read at the Higher Technical School in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1929 to metallurgical engineers.

As the editors of the German edition say in their preface, this book cannot be called a textbook. It, as well as volumes II and III of this series, which appeared in the German edition in 1931 and 1933, is intended to give a survey of the achievements of the X-ray method of investigating materials in the various fields of its application and, at the same time, to illuminate those questions with which one has to deal in using this method in practice.

The translated first volume contains a number of articles of a comparatively elementary character, setting forth the fundamentals of the methodology and cases of its application.

The first five articles—by Hengstenberg, Behnken, Seemann, Franck, and Eggert—are, as it were, introductory, acquainting the reader with the elementary physics of X-rays, apparatus, vacuum conditions, and photographic technique.

After this the methodology of materials research is presented: in particular, by Schiebold—on the foundations of crystallography and structural analysis; by Hermann—on methods of deciphering X-ray diagrams.

In the articles by Sachs, Göler, Mark, and Schinin certain questions that are solved with the aid of structural and spectral X-ray analysis are examined in greater or lesser detail. The last four articles—by Schwarz, Kantner, Herr, and Reininger—are devoted to the method of radiography, i.e. to the determination of defects in materials and products, and to those results which can be achieved by this method. In some articles of the book the literature relating to the corresponding question is given in fairly full detail.

This book produces a heterogeneous impression. Just as at conferences some papers are worse or better than others, so here we see more or less successfully composed articles, some of which will leave a person entirely unfamiliar with the described research method with a number of perplexing questions, since they are set forth too briefly, while giving nothing new to the reader familiar with the subject. Some articles, however, can satisfy both the one and the other.

We do not agree with the editor’s opinion, expressed in the preface to the Russian edition of the book, in comparing this volume with Glocker’s book. The latter is an excellent manual—a textbook, systematically presented; and anyone interested in X-ray analysis, upon reading it, will obtain a clear idea both of the methodology and of the possibilities of its application in practice. The book under review, of course, cannot replace Glocker’s book. The advantage, however, attributed to it—namely, that in it more attention is given to the practical application of X-rays—seems to us unjustified. In it, it is true, individual cases of the application of X-ray analysis in practice are set forth in somewhat greater detail, but a simple comparison of the number of pages devoted in Glocker to the practical application of the method with the corresponding number of pages in the book under review shows that, in general, Glocker devotes no less attention to this. The advantage of this book in comparison with Glocker’s may be seen, of course, in the fact that, having been published later, it contains on some questions new data obtained by the authors of the articles, and illustrates precisely Die Ergebnisse of technical X-ray science.

We agree that the Russian translation of the book will be of interest to a comparatively broad circle of readers, but it must nevertheless be emphasized that this is, of course, not a textbook and not a manual, but a supplement

to such [works], capable of serving as an aid in teaching or reading episodic courses in roentgenography.

As for the translation itself, it is, on the whole, well done; the book as a whole reads easily, but in places there are rough spots, among which we shall point out at least the following: on p. 45 Quecksilberdampfumpen is translated as “mercury” “steam” pumps. Such pumps are usually called mercury diffusion or condensation pumps. On p. 53 Dunkelreaktion is not a “darkening reaction,” but a dark reaction, and there Schleierschwärzung is not “veiled blackening,” but the intrinsic fog of the film, or the fog of the film due to development; on p. 56 it is not a “light,” but a luminous or, better, fluorescent screen, just as it is not Licht-, but Leuchtschirm. On p. 139 intermetallische Verbindung is not an intermetallic “mixture,” but a compound.

In the subject index on p. 204, instead of crystallographic coordinate axes, as the “Kristallographische Atschkreuze” are usually called in Russian, it should read crystallographic “axial crosses.”

The book is not badly produced, but on p. 59 figures I and III and Fig. 9 have been interchanged, and the “shooting diagrams” beneath them should be referred to Fig. 10.

A. Trapeznikov