The structure of abraded glass surfaces

The physical nature of the processes involved in the workshop operations of cutting and grinding are but little understood, such attention as these operations have received being mainly of an empirical nature. In the present paper some preliminary observations are recorded on the tooling of hard brittle substances where the phenomena may be expected to be simplest. Even here they are sufficiently complex. The primary object is to substitute the conception of a flaw- or fissure-complex for the current view of a hill-and-hollow structure, as characterising a ground surface in brittle materials.