The calibration of mercury vapor detectors has always posed a problem because of the difficulty of generating known concentrations of mercury vapor in air. The purpose of this study was to design an apparatus that would generate and chemically measure known concentrations of mercury vapor in air for calibration work.

It has been shown that the time of burst of exploding wires can be predicted from known thermodynamic and electrical properties of the wire materials under some conditions. The mathematical relationships are a set of integrals (transformation time integrals) similar in form to the empirical "action integrals" sometimes used in exploding wire work. This paper discusses the use of the transformation time integrals to calculate the resistance and temperature of a wire as a function of time up to the time of burst and to investigate the effects of environment of the wire on the temperature, resistance, and time of burst.