Materials of Machines

Abstract

THIS hook furnishes a very elementary treatment of the manufacture and properties of materials used in the construction and operation of machines. In the first part the author deals with fuels, refractory materials, electric furnaces, and the metallurgy of iron, steel, copper, lead, tin, zinc, and aluminium in rather less than ninety pages of a small book, and remarks in his preface that an understanding of this is essential to the study of the second part, which in 102 pages treats of the testing of materials, the iron—carbon equilibrium, cast iron, wrought iron, steel, its heat treatment, and non-ferrous alloys. The final ten pages are devoted tothe selection of materials for the various parts of a steam-engine. Seeing that the metallurgical section of the book deals exclusively with the extraction of the metals named from their ores, and ignores their mechanical treatment, the only connection between parts i. and ii. relates to the metals and alloys, e.g., cast iron and cast steel which are used in the cast state. Considering that the great bulk of the various steels used in machines are worked, this omission must be regarded as unfortunate. It is certainly an astonishing thing that the author, who is an American, should apparently not know the modern processes of extracting copper which have been developed entirely in his own country, and should have described a process which originated in Swansea, and has been superseded by them. To describe the metallurgy of copper in fewer than five pages as attempted by the author is a task that few metallurgists would undertake.