The challenge of the ruled grating

SEP 01, 1950

Sometimes an old and tried method is so steadily fruitful and so promising in what it might reveal if improved that it has served as a continuous challenge to successive generations of physicists. This is so with the diffraction grating used for spectroscopy. But it is often easier to meet the demands of increasing accuracy by changing one’s approach than it is to pursue the original method of attack. The history of ruling gratings is outlined here, as are some of the new attacks on the problem.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3067022

George R. Harrison

Few problems of experimental physics have a more colorful background than that involved in the ruling of large diffraction gratings. Nor is any problem of such great importance more widely misunderstood. After more than a hundred years of trying, by dozens of physicists and their associated instrument makers, by Nobel prizemen and amateurs alike, no one has succeeded in producing gratings having the size and power needed by modern spectroscopists. In fact, we are now in somewhat the same psychological state about the availability of large gratings as was the world about human flight at the time the Wright brothers began their experiments. Flying seemed desirable, but so many able people had tried it and failed that it appeared likely that the problem never would be solved.

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More about the authors

George R. Harrison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.