Abstract
THE report of the National Physical Laboratory for the year 1933 is a quarto pamphlet of 264 pages and 50 figures, many of them plates, and provided with an index of 10 pages. The condition of industry has reduced the demand for routine tests of instruments and for investigation of problems of manufacture, but the research programmes of the Executive Committee and of the Boards and Committees of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research have been pressed forward. An important and promising method of bringing provincial industries into touch with the Laboratory has been tried during the year, by the senior members of the staff lecturing on the general work of the Laboratory and on specific problems of local industries at many large towns in the country. Each department of the Laboratory provides its report, and each report contains matter of great interest which is well illustrated by figures and easily followed. The Radiology Division has, for example, investigated the effect of heat treatment on metals which have been cold-worked previously, and finds that a magnet steel retains its magnetic properties better when in a state of strain than when the strain is relieved by heat treatment, and that transformer steel is the better for being free from internal strain. On one hand, the Department has tested for internal flaws two Diesel engine connecting rods of 4-in. diameter, and on the other, for the Medical Research Council, the structure of human teeth.
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The National Physical Laboratory. Nature 133, 904 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133904a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133904a0