Abstract
THIS is a very unsatisfactory little book; indeed it is difficult to find anything favourable to say of it, except that it is concerned with a subject which is of considerable importance, and which might be treated in an interesting and instructive manner. It is a reprint of papers, originally published in the Electrician, on Alternating Currents of Electricity, and professes to deal with various problems connected with them by geometrical methods. But the methods are long and intricate, and the work is not well done;—carelessly written and printed in the beginning, the style remains unchanged. The errors in form are numerous, the figures are not good, and geometry and algebra are mixed up in formulas in the most puzzling and irritating way. We find commas between the factors of products (all through pp. 11, 12, 13), and diagrams in which the letters are illegible in several places. In one investigation covering three or four pages, we have the letter C used for capacity of a condenser, for electric current, for the sum of a series of cosines, and for designating points in the diagrams. In fact the whole book is full of confusion, and is a model of what mathematical writing ought not to be; while we cannot imagine that it will prove useful or even intelligible to the telegraph engineers for whose benefit we may suppose it was put together.
Alternating Currents of Electricity.
By Thomas H. Blakesley. “Electrician Series.” (London: Published at the Office of the Electrician, 1885.)
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B., J. [Book Reviews]. Nature 33, 243 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/033243b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/033243b0