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LIBRARY 



PREFACE 



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"L'avenir de §lectricite, c'est dans le vi 

 future of electricity lies in the vacuum.) This remark, 

 made before the Academic a generation ago by a famous French 

 physicist, has proved to be prophetic. For the world has 

 witnessed amazing developments in that branch of electricity 

 which is based upon the employment of a vacuum: ELECTRONICS. 

 Yet in spite of these great developments (or possibly be- 

 cause of them), and in spite of an increasingly urgent need 

 for fo rei gn- 1 anguage dictionaries, students of electronics 

 and allied problems have been forced to proceed without a 

 lexicographical tool which brings together the terminologies 

 of the two languages most vital to their work, German and 

 Engl i sh. 



The authors believe that this volume will be wel- 

 comed by all electronics engineers and all physicists, not- 

 withstanding certain limitations in size and scope which 

 have been imposed by the war. It contains nearly 21,000 en- 

 tries, representing most of the terminology current in 1939 

 and an appreciable number of terms introduced during the war 

 years. 



Owing to a lack of earlier Ge rman- En gl i sh dictionar- 

 ies in the general field of physics, the task of compilation 

 has proved unusually difficult. The only outstanding refer- 

 ence books hitherto available for consultation have been 

 Sattelberg' s Wo'r te rbuch de r el ek t ri sehen Nachrichtentechnik 

 (1926) covering the signal art in general, and Austin M. 

 Pa.tterson's famous German-English Pi c tiona ry f o r Chemi st s 

 (19 35). The bulk o~T the material Tn th e present vo lume 

 has been drawn from magazines, scientific journals, books, 

 and patent literature. The definitions gleaned from other 

 books have in most instances been amplified and re-worded. 



A somewhat unorthodox policy has been followed by 

 frequently adding explanatory annotations to the English- 

 language expressions. This has been done in order to supply 

 related terminology for the benefit of the reader who may be 

 unfamiliar with a given subject. Ample cross-references 

 have been inserted throughout. And for those who desire 

 fuller information, source and reference books- - i n cludin g a 

 number of outstanding works of British origin--have been 

 listed in a bibliography. The authors recommend purchase of 

 some of the items included in this list, particularly the 

 El ect roni cs Dictionary by Nelson M. Cooke and John Markus. 



