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This review has been prepared to assemble the data which are now available on the calorimetric determinations of the thermal properties of saturated water and steam, and to reduce them to a uniform basis for comparison. After a careful analysis of the reports which have appeared in the literature, an attempt is made to point out some possible causes for the variation among the recorded results. Wherever it seemed desirable a thermodynamic interpretation of the experiments is given, and in a number of cases the data have been recalculated. By these means the agreement among the various determinations has been improved in several instances. It is hoped that this assembly of results presented on a uniform basis may serve as an aid to future International Steam Table Conferences in the choice of base values and tolerances for the International Skeleton Tables. By means of deviation charts the experimental values for the heat content or enthalpy of the saturated liquid and for the latent heat are exhibited and compared. The agreement is in general quite gratifying. Several modern steam tables are compared graphically with one another and with the Bureau of Standards experimental results on the thermal properties of the saturated liquid and vapor. A marked improvement in the tables is evident with the increase in scope and the reliability of the basic experimental data.

A BRIEF discussion of combustion research, which has been in progress for over three hundred years, must be limited to a specific subdivision of the field. For presentation before the Society of Automotive Engineers, it is logical that this report should be confined, in a general way, to that phase of combustion research which is concerned with explosions in gases, and particularly with explosions from which, through the medium of the internal combustion engine, usable power may be derived.