Paris: Giraudet for Bachelier, 1824. First edition, very rare, and a fine copy in original state, of Carnot’s only published work, which led directly to the first and second laws of thermodynamics. “Carnot, one of the most original thinkers among physical scientists, applied himself to the analysis of the cyclical..... More
Item #4836
[Budweis, or Prague?]: N.p., August 1836. First edition, exceptionally rare. “As early as August 1836 Cauchy had a memoire ‘Sur la théorie de la lumière’ lithographed in Budweis [now in the Czech Republic], which contains the main features of the whole of today’s theory” (Grailich, p. 74, note, our translation)..... More
Item #5311
Bologna: Clemente Ferroni, 1632. First edition, rare, of Cavalieri’s highly important treatise on conic sections and their applications in optics, acoustics and, perhaps most significantly, mechanics. Its importance in the history of the telescope is well-known: “Cavalieri’s design may well have been in all the essentials a direct anticipation of..... More
Item #5314
[Chicago: Western Society of Engineers], 1897. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of this seminal work in the history of aviation, and a remarkable association copy linking three great early American pioneers of aviation and technology. In this work, Chanute presented his findings from nearly 2,000 flights made at Dune Park..... More
Item #4699
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1832. First edition, complete journal volume in original printed wrappers, of this important work on the theory of machines, a follow-up to his Du calcul de l’effet des machines, published in 1829 (but begun a decade earlier) in which he studied dynamical problems associated with rotating machinery. “His..... More
Item #5019
Paris: Bachelier, 1835. First edition, complete journal issue (‘cahier’) in original printed wrappers, of the first formulation of the ‘Coriolis force’. “On a rotating earth the Coriolis force acts to change the direction of a moving body to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the..... More
Item #5153
Paris: Béthune and Plon for Susse frères and Delloye, 1839. First edition, the true first issue (see below), of Daguerre’s exposition of his photographic process, “the beginnings of photography” (Horblit); this is an excellent unrestored copy in original printed wrappers, and very rare in this condition. “Perhaps no other invention..... More
Item #5602
Manchester: Printed by Harrison and Crosfield for Baldwin and Cradock, 1834. Second edition (first, 1793), inscribed by Dalton, of Dalton’s first book which, according to Dalton himself, “contained the germs of most of the ideas afterwards expanded by him into discoveries” (DNB V, 428-34). Dalton (1766-1844) is famous today for..... More
Item #4946
Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1679. First and only edition, incredibly rare, of the last (surviving) contribution published by the brilliant French mathematician Girard Desargues in the notorious ‘perspective wars’ – Desargues was “the greatest perspectivist and projective geometer of his generation” (Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 120). Desargues published his..... More
Item #5918
London: Abell Jeffes, 1591. Second and best edition of this important Elizabethan work on practical geometry, in which “for the first time, we have indications of an instrument which we may call a reflecting telescope” (King, The History of the Telescope, p. 29). This second edition contains several appendices by Thomas..... More
Item #5131
St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1769-1770-1771. First edition, a beautiful copy in original wrappers, of Euler’s magnum opus on optics, “widely known and important in the physics of the eighteenth century,” which “laid the foundations of the calculation of optical systems” (DSB). “The Dioptricae presented a universal optics with..... More
Item #5225
St. Petersburg: ex Typographia Academiae Scientiarum, 1739. First edition, and a remarkable copy in original state, of Euler’s most important work on music. The Swiss mathematician, scientist and philosopher Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) “contributed more to theoretical acoustics as the subject is now known than has any other man” (The New..... More
Item #5636
London: Richard Taylor and William Francis, 1852. First edition, journal issue, of these two papers containing Faraday’s detailed investigations of the nature of the ‘lines of force’ he had proposed in his first paper on electromagnetism, ‘On some new electro-magnetical motions, and on the theory of magnetism’, originally published in..... More
Item #4416
London: Richard Taylor, 1831. First edition, very rare offprint, inscribed by Faraday to his friend and fellow electrical researcher William Snow Harris, of one of Faraday’s most important papers: his experiments with sound vibrations that facilitated his revolutionary discovery of the production of electricity by electromagnetic induction. “In February 1831..... More
Item #5298
London: W. Nicol, 1826. First edition, very rare separately-paginated offprint, inscribed by Faraday to his friend and fellow electrical researcher William Snow Harris. This early chemical paper of Faraday contends that, while every substance is normally surrounded by a vapour of the same substance, and that the pressure of this..... More
Item #5299
Paris: [Chardon for] Cuchet, 1783-1784. First edition, second issue of the first volume (with the four-page supplement), of the first full-length account of the historic experiments with balloon flight conducted by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, and “the first serious treatise on aerostation as a practical possibility” (PMM). The Montgolfier..... More
Item #5411
![Item #5780 Traicté de la mesure des eaux courantes [Della misura dell’acque correnti] …...](https://sophiararebooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/5780.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&v=1660808166)
Castres: F. Barcouda, 1664. First edition in French, very rare, of two works by Castelli and Torricelli which founded the modern science of hydraulics, and including an original contribution by Fermat which is published for the first time in this work – only two other scientific works of Fermat were..... More
Item #5780
Pasadena, CA: The California Institute of Technology, 1963. Extremely rare pre-publication issue of a section of Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics, namely that devoted to electromagnetism, from Maxwell’s equations to the optical and magnetic properties of materials, and concluding with four lectures on elasticity and fluid flow. According to the..... More
Item #5135
Paris: Bachelier, 1853. First edition, rare, and an exceptionally fine copy, of Foucault’s doctoral thesis on the speed of light, in which he provides a convincing proof for the wave theory of light. In the 1840s Foucault undertook a series of optical experiments using an apparatus of rotating mirrors to..... More
Item #4843
Paris: Bernard, 1808. First printing, extremely rare, of the discovery of Fourier series, and their application to the mathematical theory of heat, appearing here 14 years before Fourier’s famous Théorie analytique de la chaleur. “This work marks an epoch in the history of both pure and applied mathematics. It is the..... More
Item #5302
de l’Academie des Sciences de l’URSS, 1937. First edition, very rare offprint, of the explanation of Cherenkov radiation, for which Frank and Tamm shared (with Cherenkov) the Nobel Prize in Physics 1958. “In certain media the speed of light is lower than in a vacuum and particles can travel faster..... More
Item #5969
München: Lentner, [1817]. First edition, journal issue, of the founding work of astrophysics, the discovery of the absorption lines in the solar spectrum; the second plate, which reproduces Fraunhofer’s drawing of these lines (etched by Fraunhofer himself), is the first illustration of the solar spectrum. “In 1802, when describing his..... More
Item #5864
Florence: Condotta, 1674. The true first edition, very rare, signed and inscribed by Viviani to Edme Mariotte, of this important Galileanum, an assembly of previously unpublished writings by Galileo, together with texts by Torricelli and Viviani himself. Most importantly, it contains the first printing of a Galileo manuscript concerned with..... More
Item #5827
Florence: Cosimo Giunti, 1615. First edition, rare, from the Riccati library, of Galileo’s principal text on the controversy over floating bodies. This work was written as a reply to two attacks by Delle Colombe (1565-1623) and Di Grazia on Galileo’s 1612 treatise on floating bodies, Discorso … intorno alle cose..... More
Item #5769
London: William Jones, 1635. First edition, extremely rare, of Gellibrand’s most important discovery: the secular change in magnetic declination, or variation. According to William Gilbert in his De Magnete (1600), the existence of magnetic declination, the difference in direction between geographical and magnetic north, is a result of the magnetic..... More
Item #5121