Abstract
My colleagues and I are not conscious of any act of impropriety in this matter, but the comments above give a misrepresentation of the position, to which I must reply briefly. It was shown more than two years ago by the work of Baker and Robb that a cathode ray tube could be used to record an infra-red spectrum, and the spectroscopic panel of the Hydrocarbon Research Group of the Institute of Petroleum decided to explore the problem as one of its several projects. By mutual agreement between Dr. Sutherland and myself, this particular project was begun by him at Cambridge, since at that time duplication of the necessary apparatus would have been difficult, if not impossible. In company with others, several of my colleagues and I saw the instrument of Daly and Sutherland in operation on February 28, but received no information about its construction other than that contained in their communication in Nature, to which acknowledgment was made in our own communication. At that time, my colleagues raised with the Cambridge workers the possibility of using a smoothed trace, since we were hoping to use this method when the necessary bolometer could be obtained; but we were given to understand that Daly and Sutherland preferred their own form of record. After obtaining a Bell Telephone thermistor in May last, we were able to complete our instrument and to demonstrate it to many visitors during June. I was eventually informed indirectly, and later directly by Dr. Sutherland, that he had now gone over to the form of recording which we had used. At no time yet have my colleagues and I ever seen any of the technical drawings or circuits used by the Cambridge workers, or had any details of the experimental arrangements not mentioned in their published note. So far as we can tell, our form of chopped wave, the amplifiers, and other electrical equipment, differ in some important features from those used by them, and the whole instrument differs from theirs much as two different types of spectrometer differ. As stated in our note, we also have already made, or are in process of making, several marked improvements since the original photographs shown in our note were taken.
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THOMPSON, H. Infra-Red Recording with the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope. Nature 158, 591 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158591b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158591b0
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