Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1888. First edition, complete journal issue in original printed wrappers, of one of the two most important papers of Hertz’s on electromagnetic waves, in which he demonstrates for the first time that electromagnetic effects propagate at the speed of light (it was only a month later..... More
Item #5310

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1874-95. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of Janssen’s epoch-making description of his ‘photographic revolver’ and of its first results, “the first ‘film’” (Singer, A History of Technology V, p. 739). “The first practical device for sequential photography, invented to record the transit of Venus in 1874, was later..... More
Item #5495

Frankfurt: Claudius Marnius & heirs of Johannes Aubrius, 1604. First edition, an excellent copy, of the foundation work of modern optics. “Working within the perspectivist tradition of Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Witelo, John Pecham, and others, Kepler accepts that sight is possible due to rays emitted from visible objects, with these..... More
Item #5230

London: Printed by John Baskett … And by the Assigns of Thomas Newcomb and Henry Hills, 1714. First edition of the Act of 1714 establishing a reward for the discovery of a method of determining longitude at sea. “An early example of a means adopted by a government for encouraging scientific discovery and progress” (Grolier/Horblit)..... More
Item #5273

Modena: impensis Authoris ex Typ. Cassiani, 1662. First edition of these very rare ephemerides, containing one of the most detailed lunar maps up to that time. Cornelio Malvasia (1603-63), a wealthy nobleman and amateur astronomer from Bologna, made his astronomical observations in the private observatory he built over his villa..... More
Item #5401

Hambourg [i.e., Leiden]: [Élie Luzac], 1753. First edition, rare, of this collection of pamphlets relating to the ‘König affair,’ the celebrated polemic on the principle of least action, “perhaps the ugliest of all the famous scientific disputes” (DSB VII: 442). The König affair is of considerable importance in the history..... More
Item #4957

Messina: Pietro Spira, August 1558. First edition, ‘excessively rare’ (Sotheran), of this collection of works on ‘spherics’, the geometrical and trigonometrical techniques necessary for the description of the motion of the celestial bodies, including Maurolico’s Latin translations of works by four ancient Greek writers, Autolycus, Menelaus, Euclid and Theodosius, those..... More
Item #2881

London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876. First edition, rare on the market in this condition, of Maxwell's textbook on dynamics, “a masterpiece of natural philosophy, notable especially for introducing into physics the term relativity in a passage that combines strenuous scientific insight with a mystical awareness … [It] had..... More
Item #3849

London: for Benj. Tooke, 1692. First edition of the first treatise on optics in English, “which for many years served as the standard textbook on lenses” (Albury, p. 455); it includes at the end the first publication of Halley’s famous theorem for finding the focal length of a spherical lens..... More
Item #5246

Pesaro: Girolamo Concordia, 1579. First edition, very rare, the Jones-Macclesfield copy, signed by William Jones, of the first modern theoretical treatise on the planisphere, an instrument for representing the celestial sphere on a plane surface. Guidobaldo was one of the most prominent figures in the renaissance of the mathematical sciences..... More
Item #5426

Pesaro; Bologna: apud Hieronymum Concordiam; Costantino Pisarri, 1588 [colophon, 1587]; 1711. First edition, the beautiful Macclesfield copy, of Guidobaldo’s Paraphrasis, the important companion to his Mechanicorum liber (1577), regarded as the greatest work on statics since the Greeks, which employed the mathematically rigorous proofs of Archimedes to the investigation of..... More
Item #4716

Leipzig & Berlin: Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig & Springer, 1869-1921. A remarkable collection of offprints, a major portion of the published works of Carl Gottfried Neumann (1832-1925), representing virtually all of the areas to which he contributed, most importantly the related fields of electromagnetism and potential theory. His lasting..... More
Item #4934

London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1756. First printing, very rare, of these letters of Newton which Koyré has described as “one of the most precious and important documents for the study and interpretation of Newtonian thought” (Koyré, Newtonian Studies (1965), p. 202). Newton here gives his views on..... More
Item #3537