Cologne: Johann Birkmann, 1562. First edition of this exceptionally rare, interesting, and notorious work – the second printed work on magnetism, preceded only by the Epistola de magnete of Peregrinus (1558) (which is virtually unobtainable). Taisnier’s work, in fact, contains a plagiarism of Peregrinus, which it reprints verbatim, and of... More
Item #4307
![Three bookes of colloquies concerning the arte of shooting: in great and small peeces of artillerie, variable randges, measure, and waight of leaden, yron, and marble stone pellets, minerall saltepeeter, gunpowder of diuers sortes, and the cause why some sortes of gunpow[d]er are corned, and some sortes of gunpowder are not corned: written in Italian, and dedicated by Nicholas Tartaglia vnto the Royall Prince of most famous memorie Henrie the eight, late King of England, Fraunce, and Ireland, defender of the faith &c. And now translated into English by Cyprian Lucar Gent. who hath also augmented the volume of the saide colloquies with the contents of euery colloquie, and with all the corollaries and tables, that are in the same volume. Also the said Cyprian Lucar hath annexed vnto the same three books of colloquies a treatise named Lucar Appendix. Niccolò TARTAGLIA.](/pictures/thumb/4103.jpg?v=1481111645)
London: [by Thomas Dawson] for John Harrison [the elder], 1588. First edition in English, very rare, of the first three books of Tartaglia’s 1546 Quesiti et Inventioni Diverse, dealing with ballistics and expanding and correcting the treatment in his 1537 Nova Scientia, the first systematic treatise on the subject. The... More
Item #4103
![On the dynamical theory of heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr Joule’s equivalent of a thermal unit and M. Regnault’s observations on steam. [Bound with:] On a method of discovering experimentally the relation between the mechanical work spent, and the heat produced by the compression of a gaseous fluid. [Together two offprints from Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. XX, Part II, 1851]. William THOMSON, Lord Kelvin.](/pictures/thumb/4028.jpg?v=1472876791)
Edinburgh: Printed for the Society by Neill and Co., 1851. First edition, the extremely rare offprints, of these groundbreaking papers in which Kelvin outlined the view, as based on recent experiments by Joule and others, that “heat is not a substance [‘caloric’], but a dynamical form of mechanical effect; we..... More
Item #4028
Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1930. First edition, offprint issue, of this important paper which introduced the ‘Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.’ Although its origins lay in statistical mechanics, this process has found a wide variety of applications, notably in mathematical finance. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, also known as the ‘Langevin equation’ in the physics..... More
Item #3253
![De Centro Gravitatis Solidorum Libri Tres. Rome: B[artolomeo] Bonfadino, 1604. [Bound with]: Quadratura Parabolae per simplex falsum. Et altera quàm secunda Archimedis expeditior ad Martium Columnam. Rome: L[epido] Facio, 1606. Luca VALERIO.](/pictures/thumb/4695.jpg?v=1546936547)
Rome: Bonfadino; Facio, 1604; 1606. First editions of these two rare and fundamental works on determining centres of gravity – these are fascinating copies with numerous contemporary annotations in an untouched contemporary binding. In these books Valerio transformed the Archimedean ‘method of exhaustion’ into a series of important theorems “so..... More
Item #4695
Amsterdam: Etienne Ledet et Compagnie, 1738. First edition, first issue, extremely rare large and thick paper copy, and in a beautiful contemporary binding, of Voltaire's only scientific work. “Owing to Descartes' great influence and Newton’s dispute with Leibnitz, the spread of his [Newton’s] thought on the continent took about fifty..... More
Item #4104