with a higher proportion of salary lost to taxation as compared with pre-war
days,
real remuneration has changed little for the young graduate. Only
the jargon of the advertisement is different. Now, instead of 'qualifications
and experience', your
4
CV is required and the salary is quoted in £K—
meant to impress I suppose. One advertisement I noticed recently pre-
ferred a 'Chartered Engineer or equivalent'. What, I wondered, would
be regarded as an 'equivalent'? Applicants were asked to write to the
'Human Resources Department' which suggested to me that a prospective
employee would be equated with so many tons of coal or some other
expendable commodity. What's wrong with the old title 'Personnel Office'
for God's sake? One wonders whether such an organisation has recruited
Monty Python as its managing director.
It is now almost forty years since the late Dr W. E. Fisher, OBE, bullied
me into producing the manuscript which became the First Edition of this
book. Then in his late seventies and the dynamic Technical Editor of the
then English
Universities
Press, he remains a great inspiration to me now
that I in turn find myself at a similar age. Originally the book was written
as a text for those student engineers taking metallurgy as a subject in
the Higher National Certificate (Engineering) Courses. At the temporary
demise of the Higher National Certificate some ten years ago this volume
was largely rewritten to provide a treatment of general physical metallurgy
at the elementary and intermediate levels.
When some years previously, 'metallurgy' had been replaced by
'materials science' in engineering syllabuses, many authors—attempting
an adroit vault on to the bandwaggon—added a hurried chapter on 'plas-
tics'
to their existing texts. In many cases this served only to display a
rather nebulous understanding of the true nature of the covalent bond. No
mention was made of other non-metallic engineering materials. Obviously
in almost forty years many new sophisticated metallic alloys have been
developed whilst other metals, hitherto known only as symbols in the
Periodic Classification of the Elements, have been drawn into the technol-
ogy of the late twentieth century. Thus lithium, scandium, gallium, yttrium,
indium, lanthanum, praseodymium, neodynium, samarium, gadolinium,
dysprosium, erbium, thulium and ytterbium have all found uses during
recent years in commercial alloys. They join boron, titanium, germanium,
zirconium, niobium, cerium, hafnium and tantalum which had become
metallurgically valuable during the immediately previous decades. Conse-
quently this book has grown over the years so that it contains some 40%
more pages than the first edition. Nevertheless it is still confined to a study
of metallurgy and those who wish to study materials science for HNC or
on a more general level should consult other titles.
R. A. HIGGINS
Walsall,
West Midlands.