Abstract
ALTHOUGH the subtitle of this book indicates a comprehensive aim, it is only the construction of primary batteries that receives at all full treatment. In this respect the work is pretty thorough, since the author describes more than 200 different types of cell. The descriptions are short, but are supplemented in many instances by drawings, and should be sufficient to give any reader a clear idea of the essential features of the cell. Data as to the E.M.F., internal resistance and discharge are also given for a fair number of typical batteries. As a handy reference book to which one can turn for information of this sort, this volume should prove very useful, especially, perhaps, to the amateur or to the inventor who is anxious to see if amongst these 200 odd cells there is room for yet one more. From a scientific point of view, the work is disappointing; the tabulation of the different cells is not carried out upon any definite system of classification, so far as we can see, and the theoretical discussion in the first seventy pages is inadequate and unsatisfactory. It is hardly adequate, for example, only to describe the Grotthuss theory (as modified by Clausius) and to speak of this as the “accepted theory of to-day.” Again, the fundamental conceptions do not appear to have been clearly grasped by the author, who seems to think that energy and force are the same, and that electricity is a form of energy and may be defined as “a mode of motion in the atoms of bodies.” We should not comment upon these errors in a work which is more particularly of a practical character did not the author claim in his preface that “the theory of the battery has been carefully gone into.” Should another edition be called for, we think Mr. Bottone would be well advised to omit the theoretical part altogether and confine himself to the careful tabulation of the cells; the information contained in the descriptive part must have needed considerable pains to collect and can hardly fail to prove useful.
Galvanic Batteries: their Theory, Construction and Use.
By S. R. Bottone. Pp. xvi + 376. (London: Whittaker and Co., 1902.) Price 5s.
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S., M. Galvanic Batteries: their Theory, Construction and Use . Nature 67, 31 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/067031b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067031b0