Shaul Katzir, <i>Sonar to Quartz Clock: Technology and Physics in War, Academy, and Industry</i> Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 368. ISBN 978-0-19-887873-5. £45.00 (hardback).

Quartz, a crystalline form of silica, is a crucial material in the infrastructure of our contemporary world.Assembled with integrated circuits and a power source, slivers of quartz are at work in nearly every electronic device today.Despite that centrality, how quartz came to play such a large role is generally unknown, except to a relatively small group of researchers and technical practitioners.Similarly disregarded is the history of the fundamental property that makes quartz usefulthe piezoelectric effect.The Curie brothers Jacques and Pierre first noted in 1880 that certain substances, when subjected to mechanical stress, generate electrical charges.The converse is also true.When subjected to electricity, certain crystals like quartz change dimensions, and they can also maintain a stable rate of vibration.Learning how to apply this piezoelectric resonance ultimately led to the establishment of a community of specialists and the invention of fundamental instruments for detecting sound and ultrasound, controlling electrical frequencies and building precision clocks.In the historiography of science and technology, few materials are so critical and yet so underexplored.Shaul Katzir is doing his best to remedy the oversight.Piece by piece, his numerous publications address the history of piezoelectricity from its beginnings to the eve of the Second World War in varied academic, industrial and government settings.His works join a very short list of other histories that explain quartz crystals' unusual properties and substantial utility in the twentieth centuryamong them, Richard J. Thompson's Crystal Clear: The Struggle for Reliable Communications Technology in World War II (2011) and Christopher Shawn McGahey's 2009 dissertation 'Harnessing nature's timekeeper: a history of the piezoelectric quartz crystal technological community (1880-1959)'.This book begins in the middle of piezoelectric history with a fresh look at how sonar research proceeded during the First World War and influenced the direction of research thereafter.Key was the foundational work of physicist Walter Cady, who identified piezoelectric resonance after his involvement in wartime submarine detection.Cady studied the behaviour of piezoelectric crystals, trained numerous students and convinced other researchers that crystal-based devices had utility.The author outlines how still other investigators took up frequency control and measurement, especially in the service of electrical communications technologies in the United States, Europe and Japan.He links these investigations in the interwar years to the development of the quartz