Abstract
THE catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Scientific Instruments and Apparatus to be held at the Imperial College by the Physical Society on January 9–11 is an octavo volume of 184 pages, the trade section occupying 148, the research and experimental section 26, and the index to the trade section 5 pages. Reference to the exhibits, the stands and the firms exhibiting has been greatly facilitated by the number of the stand and the name of the firm being printed at the head of each page. A considerable number of illustrations are provided, but there is still a number of firms satisfied with showing little more than the outside appearance of a piece of apparatus, for example, a box on the top of which are a handle for carrying, a small window and a few terminals, instead of a diagram of its mechanism or a view of its interior. As a contrast, the descriptions in the research and experimental section are full of the information which a potential user of an instrument or a method requires in order to determine whether it will suit his purpose. In the trade section, instruments which have not been exhibited previously are marked with an asterisk and on the stalls with a red star. Many of them are connected with branches of physics which have in recent years become important in industry, for example, detectors of dangerous gases in air, X-ray equipment, colorimeters, valves and photoelectric cells. Others introduce new methods into old fields, for example, an engraving machine which seems likely to displace etching, a gas tube which leaks an electrostatic charge away if the potential exceeds a fixed value, a polish measurer working photoelectrically, and an optical tube of small diameter for examining the inside surfaces of long tubes. For this device the name “introscope” has been invented. Other new names are “grapher” for recorder, “hygro-graph”, “opacimeter”, “stormograph” and “stormoguide” for forms of barograph, any of which may at some future date find places in a new Oxford dictionary.
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The Physical Society's Exhibition. Nature 133, 20–21 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133020d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133020d0