Temperature: Its Measurement and Control in Science and Industry, 1941

American Institute of Physics — Reinhold Publishing, New York, 1941. Hardcover symposium volume.

Few scientific reference works capture a discipline at a more consequential crossroads than this 1941 symposium volume. Published on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Temperature: Its Measurement and Control in Science and Industry assembled the leading thermometrists, physicists, and engineers of the era to take stock of everything known about measuring and controlling temperature — at precisely the moment that knowledge was about to be tested to its limits. Within months of publication, the contributors' expertise would be pressed into service for wartime metallurgy, munitions production, radar development, and ultimately the Manhattan Project, where precise thermal control was a matter of national survival. The volume stands as both a definitive prewar synthesis and an inadvertent time capsule of American industrial science on the brink of transformation.

Topics Covered

• Thermodynamic temperature scales and international fixed points
• Thermocouple design, calibration, and industrial application
• Resistance thermometry and platinum standards
• Optical and radiation pyrometry for high-temperature measurement
• Low-temperature and cryogenic techniques
• Temperature control in metallurgy, chemical processing, and laboratory research

An exceptional reference for collectors of measurement science literature, historians of physics and engineering, and anyone drawn to the instruments and ideas that shaped 20th-century industry.