Instrumentation Industrielle

Book reviews Landmarks in Metrology - 1 9 8 3 Instrument Society of America/John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, pp 229, £25.70 The title needs explanation. The 'landmarks' are not those reached during 1983, but 'papers, originally presented within the last 30 years, which have demonstrated a lasting technical importance'. They are in the fields of electrical metrology and thermometry; and they are exclusively American. The book is a record of a conference session held in 1983, and three-quarters of it consists of reprints of the original papers. It is a type of book which, when proposed, tends to encounter the objection that modern papers - even the best of them - are written for specialists, so that the general reader can take them in only if they happen to relate nearly to his own field. The conference organisers thought of a good way to overcome this trouble: invite the original authors to introduce the papers and to have second thoughts about them. (They are lucky to have had so many of the authors available.) The authors' new introductions seem to have escaped refereeing and editing - the informality of some of them was better suited to the conference hall than to a permanent record. More seriously, most of the authors have failed to use their opportunities;perhaps non-specialists could have set the scene better. Why had the time come for the advances which these papers describe? How widely have the new ideas been applied? Such questions are answered in respect of the papers on thermometry but not the others. Within the selected field of subject matter, the choice is well made, with papers on the current comparator, the Josephson voltage standard, the dual-slope converter, thermojunctions for AC-DC conversion, junctions for parallel and series connections of four-terminal resistors, and the realisation of the International Practical Temperature Scale. These are indeed fields in which great advances have been made. But although these are papers of the first rank, they are not reviews (and were never meant to be) and so the book necessarily leaves some interesting questions unanswered. For example, Kusters's two important papers of 1964 and 1968 describe his current comparator. But I should have liked to know the background to the 1968 paper;did the DC comparator owe anything to the second-h~rmonic magnetic amplifier and to the flux-gate magnetometer? We have Hermach's papers of 1960 and 1966 on thermal A C DC converters; his new presentation makes some comparison with the rival multi-junction converters, but more on that subject would have been welcome. This ought to be a book for individuals rather than for libraries (which should already have the original papers on their shelves). In the present state of foreign currency exchanges, however, a book produced in the USA is under a financial handicap anywhere else. Enthusiasts will buy this one, but they will have to do so in spite of the price.

A. C Lynch

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I nstrumentation I nd ustrielle Michael Cerr

Lavoisier TEC & DOC, Paris. Vol 1, pp xii + 524, FF 330.00; Vol 2, pp x x + 667, FF 430.00 The technology of measurement and instrumentation depends upon a sound foundation of fundamental concepts and principles. These are always in a state of development. To some intent because of the differences of language and of scientific and enducational culture, barriers arise which prevent the diffusion of thought which would promote and enrich the development of systematic measurement and instrumentation science. It is the task of Measurement to surmount such barriers. It is therefore right to review this interesting book and to make it known to a circle of readers outside the Francophone world. The book is a collaborative work of four French authors Michel Chaouloff, Jean-Claude Engrand, Michel Richard and Franqois Rossmann - who use Michel Cerr as a pseudonym. The authors are all industrial practitioners. The work is an introduction to fundamental concepts and principles rather than a handbook of practical instrumentation. The first volume deals with measurement and instrumentation principles, the second with basic automatic control. The value of the book to a foreign reader lies in its structure and the arrangement of material, in particular the manner in which signals and signal theory has been treated. It is also interesting to see the discussion of fundamental metrology and of errors. However, there is an absence of material that many would consider most important such as, for example, modelling of instruments and the treatment of instruments as systems. Much of the material is a standard treatment of topics such as control theory. There is of course no reason why it should not be. However, the originality of the arrangement and the treatment of some of the fundamental concepts makes the book valuable reading for all concerned with the general principles of measurement and instrument science.

L. Finkelstein

Books received T h e fundamental physical frontier of measurement B. W. Petley

constants

and

the

Adam Hilger Ltd, Bristol. pp 346 + x, £28.50 Transducers in measurement and control (3rd Ed) Peter H. Sydenham

Adam Hilger Ltd, Bristol. pp 114 + x, £12.95 Coaxial A C bridges B. P. Kibble and G. H. Rayner

Adam Hilger Ltd, Bristol. pp 203 + xii, £25.00

Measurement Vol 2 No 4, Oct--Dec 1984