Landolt-Bornstein, the International Critical Tables and Their Successors

By way of example, Volume 26 in Group III (Crystal and Solid State Physics) is devoted to Diffusion in Solid Metals and Alloys, this volume has an editor and 14 contributors. Their task was not only to gather numerical data on such matters as self- and chemical diffusivities, pressure dependence of diffusivities, diffusion along dislocations, surface diffusion, but also to exercise their professional judgment as to the reliability of the various numerical values available. The whole volume of about 750 pages is introduced by a chapter describing diffusion mechanisms and methods of measuring diffusivities this kind of introduction is a special feature of Landolt-Bornstein . Subsequent developments in diffusion data can then be found in a specialised journal. Defect and Diffusion Forum, which is not connected with Landolt-Bdrnstein. 

Other early tabulations of numerical data were the French Tables Annuelles de Constantes et Donnees Numeriques which appeared for some decades after 1920, and the British Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants, masterminded by the National Physical Laboratory and known affectionately as Kaye and Laby after the editors, which appeared annually in single volume form from 1911 to 1966. These last two, like Landolt-Bdrnstein, appeared regularly, in successive editions. 

Something rather different was the set of 7 volumes of the International Critical Tables masterminded by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, edited by Edward Washburn, and given the blessing of the International Research Council (the predecessor of the International Council of Scientific Unions, ICSU). This appeared in stages, 1926-1933, once only when Washburn died in 1934, the work died with him . This last quotation comes from a lively survey of the history of ICSU (Greenaway 1996) this book has an entire chapter devoted to Data, and Scientific Information . 

It was not until the mid-1960s that Harrison Brown (later ICSU President) called attention to the absence of any successor to the International Critical Tables, and was asked by ICSU to make recommendations. This led to ICSU s creation of CODATA, following on from ICSU s earlier World Data Centers, devoted to specific sciences such as metereology. This body is more of a gadfly and organiser 

For many materials scientists the database for which they automatically reach when a problem arises like the one with which 1 opened this chapter is the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, now in its 81st edition, with over 2500 pages of densely packed information. This Handbook was first published in 1914 (a few years were missed because of wars), at the instigation of Arthur Friedman, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur one of his eompanies was the Chemical Rubber Company, CRC, in Cleveland, Ohio, which supplied laboratory items in rubber. The CRC published the Handbook from the start, and still does... hence the Handbook s nickname. The Rubber Bible. In the early years, Friedman used the Handbook as a promotional device for the sale of such items as rubber stoppers. 

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