This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.

Gaseous Electronics, Volume I: Electrical Discharges deals with the intelligent application of gaseous electronics principles and devices to a variety of practical problems, with emphasis on electrical discharges. This text consists of seven chapters and begins with a discussion on the short history of gaseous electronics. The discussion then turns to the behavior of glow discharges when the applied voltage is direct current or low-frequency alternating current. The applications of cataphoresis, including gas purification, and the effects of cataphoresis on gas lasers are considered. The chapters that follow explore high-frequency and microwave discharges; corona discharges; arcs and torches; and plasmas generated by electron beams and shock waves. These treatments of various kinds of discharge include macroscopic manifestations, such as I-V characteristics and qualitative phenomena, as well as descriptions of the underlying phenomena in terms of microscopic processes. This book is intended for research students and practitioners of electronics and electrical engineering as well as physics.