Abstract
THE production of a small thin quartz plate from a large crystal weighing several pounds involves a long succession of operations, including repeated cutting, surfacing and checking. Each step requires some form of grinding or lapping, and with the extremely high precisions required and material so hard as quartz, these processes are slow and exacting, although multiple processing reduces the net time per crystal considerably. Until crystals began to be used extensively in electrical work, the grinding of hard brittle substances was limited chiefly to jewels, and the techniques and materials employed were not very well suited to a large-scale processing of quartz. As a result, a considerable amount of research and development was carried out in the Bell Laboratories to discover the most satisfactory methods and to design the most useful machines. An article by W. L. Bond (Bell Lab, Rec., 22, No. 8; April 1944) describes the various lapping and grinding processes employed.
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Processing Quartz. Nature 154, 50 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154050a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154050a0