Abstract
IN recent years, standard spectroscopic technique has been adopted by many industrial research laboratories and has proved a most valuable tool for the identification of the form and nature of impurities which have crept into the materials of ordinary technical processes. It frequently happens that when a manufacturing process goes wrong, there are very few outward and visible signs of the nature of the trouble. A lamp, for example, may have a slightly darkened glass bulb which is indicative of trouble to come. This darkening of the bulb may be due to minute traces, a thin film perhaps, of some deposit. It would be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine the nature of the deposit by ordinary chemical means. If the whole of it could be removed it might not weigh more than one ten thousandth of a gram. If the spectroscopist can remove the deposit, he is in an ideal position to give the manufacturer further clues as to the nature of his trouble. Technical processes are also frequently dependent on the addition of a small percentage of some foreign material to the bulk. In applied physics we may mention the quantity of thoria or silica in a tungsten filament; in metallurgy the percentage of nickel or tungsten in a steel.
Article PDF
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
RANDALL, J. Spectroscopy in the Service of Industry. Nature 132, 574 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132574a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132574a0