New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1949. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of the first comprehensive report on the transistor, one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century. “In the 1930s, Bell Labs scientists were trying to use ultrahigh frequency waves for telephone communications..... More
Item #5489

[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

London: Taylor & Francis, 1911. First English-language printing, in the rare separately-issued offprint, of the experiment that put a number on transmutation itself: the authors’ own English text, unaltered in substance, of the complete paper that the Vienna Academy had printed in German in its Sitzungsberichte in March 1911. Working..... More
Item #6728

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

[Paris]: [Masson et Cie], 1889; 1895; 1903. The doctoral theses of Marie, Pierre and Jacques Curie and of Langevin as the Annales de Chimie et de Physique printed them, on forty sheets that never went to the binder: each sheet still carries its sixteen pages in the order the pressman..... More
Item #6717

[London: Harrison & Sons for the Royal Society, 1926]. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of Dirac’s paper, which “is justly seen as a major contribution to quantum theory” (Kragh, p. 36). It introduced his quantum mechanical derivation of what is now called Fermi-Dirac statistics, which describes a distribution of particles..... More
Item #5980

London: Harrison & Sons for the Royal Society, 1930. First edition, extremely rare offprint, of Dirac’s prediction of antimatter – although he did not accept it as such until a year later (see below) – and the advent of the dynamical view of the vacuum which was fundamental to the..... More
Item #6026

Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1926. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprint (not to be confused with the much more common trade separate – see below), from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, of the notorious Einstein/Rupp experiments. “In the fall of 1926, Albert Einstein published the..... More
Item #6414

Berlin: Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1925. First edition, very rare author’s presentation offprint (not to be confused with the more common trade separate – see below), from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld with his signature and annotations, of Einstein’s third paper on his quantum theory of..... More
Item #6417

[Not published: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA: 1950]. First and only edition, extremely rare, of the mimeographed notes of Feynman’s lecture course on meson theory, delivered as a visiting lecturer at Caltech (to which he moved permanently in the following year). Feynman had developed his distinctive diagrammatic approach while..... More
Item #5205

Vancouver: [np], 1975. A detailed draft for a talk given to the Canadian Association of Physics Students, in Vancouver, on the contemporary state of subatomic particle physics, its current difficulties and possible future developments. Although a ‘popular’ talk, it is pitched at a high level, appropriate to postgraduate students in physics..... More
Item #4859

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter und Co., 1939 [1942, 1944]. First edition, offprint issues, of the three fundamental papers on nuclear fission which eventually lead to the creation of the atom bomb. “…experiments conducted in 1938 at Berlin by Hahn and Strassman [sic] were reported to Lise Meitner, an Austrian scientist..... More
Item #4152

Berlin: Springer, 1935-1939. First edition, journal issues in original printed wrappers, including the true first appearance of Hahn and Strassmann’s discovery of nuclear fission, as well as the work of Hahn and Meitner which led up to the discovery, and the subsequent work of Hahn and Strassmann on the identification..... More
Item #6595