Radio Engineering

Abstract

A CERTAIN ruthlessness is inevitable in any text-book, and the permissible coefficient of ruthlessness is higher in engineering than in physics. Yet there is room for doubt whether a book on radio engineering which does not once mention the names of such founders as Clerk Maxwell, Popoff, Marconi, Jackson, Oliver Lodge, Larmor and Eccles does not fall below that level of piety which may fairly be demanded of even the 'toughest guy' in applied science. It is also to be doubted whether a book in which the first chapter, on the “Elements of a System of Radio Communication” , is so ruthlessly shorn of qualifications, limitations and explicit cautions about implicit assumptions and simplifications is safe reading, even for engineers. The spiritual danger is obvious, but that there is much practical danger is well illustrated in such things as the misapplication of the “Rayleigh-Carson reciprocal theorem”, a sharp-edged tool which is of great value in sufficiently subtle hands, but which produces strange shapes from the hand of the ruthless.

Radio Engineering

By Prof. Frederick Emmons Terman. Pp. xiii + 813. (New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1937.) 30s.