Bibliography

G. Tyagunov and A. Zhigarev. 1. Electronic Tubes (instructional charts), Gosenergoizdat, 1948, price 32 rubles. 2. Electronic Devices (instructional charts), Series II, Gosenergoizdat, 1949, price 38 rubles.

The great importance that physical and applied electronics has acquired at the present time, having become so widely disseminated, naturally compels us to devote ever greater attention to the teaching of this discipline. From this point of view, the publication of all kinds of instructional literature that can facilitate and improve the teaching of electronics is a timely and useful undertaking. One should therefore welcome the manual reviewed here, which has an interesting and as yet unused form. This publication consists of two folders of 19 (nominally 24) charts, containing large-format, multicolor drawings characterizing various kinds of electronic emissions and various vacuum electronic devices with their envelopes opened. It should considerably help in understanding the principles of their operation and the elements of their construction. The charts examine almost all the principal types of vacuum devices, such as, for example, various electron tubes, including modern ultrashort-wave tubes, photoelectric cells, secondary-electron multipliers, television devices, the electron microscope, etc. No text is supplied with the charts, and therefore their use is possible either with the additional availability of a special manual or in the course of a lecture presentation. There is no doubt that the presence of such charts, together with lecture demonstrations, will render substantial assistance in teaching a course on electronic devices.

The charts contain certain errors: for example, in the diagrams labeled “electric field in a diode, triode,” what is actually given is a distribution not of the field but of the potential; in the diagrams of various emissions with numbers on the coordinate axes it is not indicated to what particular material they refer. One graph of the electron trajectory in crossed fields is not entirely correct; the only example given of the use of the electron microscope for observing influenza viruses, etc., is insufficiently illustrative. These shortcomings should be eliminated in a subsequent edition of this useful manual, and a similar publication should also be extended to gas-discharge devices.

N. D. Morgulis.