Abstract
High temperature and high pressure technologies are both new and old subjects. A romanticist would claim that mankind’s control of temperature began with the gift of fire from Prometheus, while a historian would point to Egyptian glass fabrication and Hittite metal smelting as examples of early high temperature technology. Even as far back as 212 B.C., Archimedes employed a very sophisticated high temperature technology by using a solar imaging lens to defend Syracuse, his home town, by setting fire to the sails of the attacking Roman ships. Pressure technology, while not dating as far back, is at least 300 years old and begins perhaps with Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) who is credited with making the first air compressor pump and devising the famous Magdeburg hemispheres which were held together so firmly by vacuum that several horses were needed to separate them. Despite this antiquity, high temperature-high pressure technology has advanced so dramatically in the last two decades that even the 350-odd pages of this manual can do little more than introduce the subject.
Published Version
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