Electrolytic and Chemical Polishing

Apart from two or three experiments at the beginning of the century, methods of polishing metallic surfaces by a process of anodic dissolution—electro-polishing or electrolytic polishing—have been known only for the last 25 years. Recently it has been discovered that electric current is not always indispensable, and as a result techniques of chemical polishing have been elaborated, which are limited to certain metallic materials and much less general in their applications.