Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1693. First edition of this superb collection of thirty-one treatises by the leading scientists of seventeenth-century France, almost all of which are published here for the first time. This is one of the earliest important publications of the Académie des Sciences, and one of the most magnificent..... More
Item #4565

Paris: David l’ainé, 1743; 1747. First edition of one of the classics in the history of science, d’Alembert’s formalization of the new science of mechanics. “The ‘Treatise on Dynamics’ was d’Alembert’s first major book and it is a landmark in the history of mechanics. It reduces the laws of the..... More
Item #5322

Turin: heirs of Niccolò Bevilaqua, 1585. First edition, very rare, of Benedetti’s major work, his Book of Various Mathematical and Physical Ideas, which include theories of motion and experiments on falling bodies predating Galileo’s studies on the subject, as well as studies of perspective presented in three-dimensional terms, fifty years..... More
Item #4919

[Colophon:] Venice: Venturino Ruffinello for Curtio Navo and brothers, 1540. First edition, very rare in contemporary binding, of the “first comprehensive treatise on the ‘pyrotechnic’ or fire-using arts, including mining, metallurgy, applied chemistry, gunpowder, military arts and fireworks. Virtually all of Biringuccio’s descriptions are original, based upon first-hand information garnered..... More
Item #5330

[London: Harrison and Sons], 1910. Presentation offprint, inscribed in Bohr’s hand to the chemist Einar Biilmann, of the ‘Second Royal Society Paper’ – what Bohr “learned by working in this field may have been a help to him when, more than a quarter of a century later, he showed that..... More
Item #3505

The Hague: Adriaan Vlacq, 1655-56. First edition, very rare and a fine copy. “In 1656 French physician, chemist, botanist, and savant Pierre Borel published the first documentary history of the invention of the telescope and microscope in De vero telescopii inventore … in The Hague. Borel’s work also contained Christiaan..... More
Item #5415

Bologna: Giacopo Monti, 1667. First edition, an extraordinary association copy, of the first published book on the laws of percussion, and containing important hitherto unpublished material from the lectures of Galileo and Torricelli. This copy was a gift from Prince Leopold of Tuscany, Borelli’s patron at the Tuscan court. Probably..... More
Item #3935

Rome: typis Komarek in via Cursis, 1745. First edition, very rare, of the first published statement of Boscovich’s universal force law, the basis of his atomic theory of matter, which prefigures much of his masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium in Natura Existentium (1758) – at the..... More
Item #5520

Ferrara: Francesco Suzzi, 1629. First edition, a unique pre-publication presentation copy by Cabeo to his teacher Jacobo Corrado, of the first extensive study of magnetism since William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600). Corrado’s name is handwritten on the title page, which is in an unfinished state, the coat-of-arms at the head..... More
Item #5178

[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

[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

Colonia [Venice]: Andrea Poletti, 1693. First edition, rare when complete, of this sumptuously illustrated work, a uniquely valuable source for the documentation of several of the most elaborate large-scale globes and astronomical mechanisms, some now lost, constructed during the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Coronelli, a Franciscan monk, was..... More
Item #4861