Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Dyson's First Paper, 1948

Dyson, Freeman J.  "Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels" in The Physical Review, second series, vol 73, no 6, March 15, 1948.  The paperbound issue offered in the original wrappers.  Very nice copy, with the original owner's name in (small) pen at top center of the front wrapper.  Scarce.  $150

The fine description of the young Dyson is from the superior History of Math website of St. Andrews (found here):

"Dyson worked closely with Bethe and became deeply impressed by him (as all Bethe's students were.) In 1948 Dyson published a paper on Lamb shift in Physical Review called The Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels. This was the first paper he had published on physics, and it showed his remarkable ability at calculation as well as a deep physical understanding. It is clear that at this time Dyson was considered to be an extraordinarily gifted and able student. Bethe persuaded Oppenheimer to take Dyson on at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He wrote in his letter of recommendation:-

Mr Dyson is absolutely unusual in his ability and accomplishments. I can say without reservation that he is the best I have ever had or observed."

Alonzo Church's First Published Work, 1924

Church,  Alonzo.  " Uniqueness of the Lorentz Transformation".  Mathematical Association of America,  1924.  1st edition.  Published in the American Mathematical Monthly, vol 31, number 8, October 1924  8vo.  Fine condition.  We offer the rare monthly issue of the AMM containing Church's contribution on pp 376-382. This is Church's first published work (in a career in which he published over EIGHT decades and 71 years), complete when he was 22, just two years before he received his PhD from Princeton. He would of course stay on at Princeton and have one of the most important American careers in logic in the 20th century. Enderton (and the St, Andrews mathematics website) on the atmosphere at Princeton during its heydey in the 1930's: "Princeton in the 1930's was an exciting place for logic. There was Church together with his students Rosser and Kleene. There was John von Neumann. Alan Turing, who had been thinking about the notion of effective calculability, came as a visiting graduate student in 1936 and stayed to complete his Ph.D. under Church. And Kurt Gödel visited the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933 and 1935, before moving there permanently."

$250.00

Shapley and the Expanding Universe

Shapley, Harlow (1906-1966). Two papers.

(1) On the Distribution of GAlaxies.  Pp 389-393.

(2) Note on the Problem of the Expanding Universe. Pp 148-154.

Both offprints from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  19/4 (April 1933) and 24/3 (1938), respectively.  Both very good copies. $125, the pair.

The Analyst--an American Math Journal

We offer a nice selection of an uncommon American mathematical journal, The Analyst, a Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, namely, five (of the complete six) issues of volume VI (1879).   ABout 160pp altogether. 
In the original printed wrappers.  Good condition.  $100/all

A Short Note on Clerk Maxwell's Reading

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[Maxwell, James Clerk.] Scientific Worhies, XVIII--James Clerk Maxwell. In: NAture, 27 October 1881. Page 601 of the weekly issue (of pp 601-624). Removed from larger bound volume.  OFfered with the steel-engraved frontispiece portrait of Maxwell.  Very good condition. $125 [Article length: approximately 750 words.]

We shall find that it is the peculiar function of physical science to lead  us . . . to the confines of the incomprehensible. —J. C. M., 1860

What is done by what I call myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.—Comment made by Maxwell to the Reverend Professor F.J.E. Hort in 1879 when terminally ill.

[Both quotes found in Fred Seitz's article in  the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,  March 2001, "James Clerk Maxwell, (1833-1879), Member APS 1875".

This note may restrict itself to a small population of readers of this blog, but I'm always fascinated to come upon notices of the reading habits and library book-borrowing practices of significant people.  For example Herman Melville's reading has been particularly studied, with scholars hunting books that had once belonged to him and then dispersed at auction (some going to the Brooklyn Public Library), and there are records of his borrowing practices at the library as well.  Thomas Jefferson's reading habits is a well-known and fascinating study (though he did little borrowing, per se, what with there being few borrowing  libraries for him to visit, and then of course his library was much larger than anything else remotely close to him).

The library of Leonard is also well known--over the years via my bookstore I've had a number of people (usually involved in a classical study program, or St. John's folks, etc) looking to try to reproduce Leonardo's library.   In general, though, the full classification of the library of working scientists is not in general a known thing. (An interesting tour of some of the 116 books that comprise the library as described in the Codex Atlanticus and written around 1509 [left].  can be found at Museo Galileo, here.)

This is the main reason why my interest was piqued when I read this biographical treatment of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)  in the 27 October 1881 issue of Nature magazine. It mentions the while the great Maxwell was not-yet-great, studying at the University of Edinburgh (which he attended from 1847-1850, when he was just sixteen), that he used the library there extensive, and that the library has "records" of that reading.  The article quotes P.G.Tait from an 1879 article in that same journal (Nature, volume XXI, p 317)  that during the years at Edinburgh "without keeping the regular course for a degree", Maxwell "carried home for study..such books as Fourier's Theorie de la Chaleur, Monge's Geometrque Descriptive, Newton's Optiks, Willis' Principles of Mechanisms, Cauchy's Calcul Differentiel, Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, and others of a very high order.  These were read through, not merely consulted." 

I'd like to see the whole list, though as yet I've not been able to find it, and I've not yet been able to find the right person to speak with at Edinburgh to determine whether there is a full list of Maxwell's borrowing habits, or not.  It would be an interesting thing to see.  After all, the man did basically invent modern physics, and it was his portrait among the very few that were displayed in Einstein's house at 112 Mercer Street.

 

Nutmeg and the Roundabout Creation of New York City

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1704

This may be the earliest image of "New York" as it was--that is "New York" instead of "New Amsterdam".  From what looks like an extraordinarily bad trade (sitting here in its future with 350-years of hindsight), the Dutch and the English came to terms at the end of the second Dutch-English War (1665-1667)  with at least one result that  traded the small island of Run in the Banda Islands for another small (but not nearly so small as Run) island in North America:  Manhattan.

Manhattan didn't have one thing that Run and the Bandas had, though, and that one thing was enormously valuable--nutmeg trees.  From the nutmeg tree came nutmeg and mace; nutmeg was a spice and a supposed medicinal, and traded for more than the price of gold, allowing its producers a phenomenal return on their investment.

The Bandas were in a remote place removed from remote places in Indonesia.  In the island group--which rose from great depths of the ocean--the total land mass was about 180 km^2. Not much, except if they were the only places on Earth producing a commodity in sensational demand. The Dutch kept control of the islands for a long time, and kept their trade in the spices an abject money-maker.  They secured their uncontested control of the island group at the end of that second Anglo-Duch War with the Treaty of Breda, one section of which had the Brits returning Run to the Dutch in exchange for Manhattan, which was at the time still occupied by the Duke of York, who was the brother of Charles II and who would become James II.  And thus the island became "New York".

Due to various reasons--not the least of which was the Dutch murder and export of the un-murdered indigenous population of the Bandas, who were the people who actually best knew how to care and administer the nutmeg trees--the great trade in the spices continued with diminishing effect in the Napoleonic Wars, an unpretty story of much bloodshed and enslavement.

{Image: "Fort Hollandois de l'Ile de Banda. - Hollands Fort op t' Eiland Banda."Original engraving  by J.V. Schley and printed aorund 1750 (39.5x25 cm) for  Antoine Prévost's Histoire générale des Voyages published in Paris between 1746 and 1770.  The name of the structure was actually Fort Nassau.   Good copy.  $100

 

 

 

Rutherford and Chadwick on Scattering of Alpha Particles

Rutherford, Ernest. and James Chadwick.  "Scattering of Alpha-Particles by Atomic Nuclei and the Law of Force". Offprint: Philosophical Magazine, November, 1925. Pp 889-913, in the original printed wrappers.

Offered with:

Rutherford, Ernest and James Chadwick.  "The Scattering of Alpha-Particles by Helium" .  Offprint from the Philosophical Magazine, September, 1927.  Pp 605-620, in the original printed wrappers. 

Nice copies:  $200  [See here for Rutherford bibliography.]

First German Edition of Volta's Law of Contact Electricity, 1802

JF Ptak Science Books 

Alexander Volta:  "Ueber die sogenannte galvanische Electricitat..."   Volta's original paper "Sull' identita del Fluido Elettrico col Fluide Galvanico"was published in the same year  (1802) as this, the first German appearance in print of this seminal work describing the electrical forces acting upon the metal plates in a voltaic pile. These papers appear in Annalen der Physik Herausgegeben von Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert, series I volume 10.  We offer the entire 512pp volume for the half-year (1802), complete, with Volta's paper occupying pp 421-449 and again at pp. 497-520.

With numerous contributions on the galvanic pile including the following in the viertes stueck:

[I]  "Berichte an die mathematisch-physikalische Klasse des franzosischen National-Instituts ueber Volta's galvanische Versuche" pp 391-420l [II]  "Ueber die sogenannte galvanische Electricitat von Alexander Volta"  pp 421-449; [III] "Untersuchungen ueber die Natur der Voltaischen Saule, von J.C.L. Reinhold, pp 450-481;[IV] "Nachricht von einer sehr in der Naehe beobachteten Wasserhose, by Professor C.H. Wolke", pp 482-488.

Condition:  Ex-libris Deutsche Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung, then Wright Patterson Field Library (USAF), then Library of Congress.  Library markings:  small gilt-stamped "Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung", page edges stamped "Wright Field Library/Dayton, Ohio" on top and bottom. Contents quite nice  $325.00

"A long memoir by Volta in two parts...reports that by measuring the electrometer deflections with different pairs of metals he found that the forces which drive the electric fluid...from the first metal to the second are: silver/copper 1, copper/iron 2, iron/thin 3, lead/tin 1, lead/zinc 5. Then the force for silver/zinc in immediate contact is 12 (1+2+3+1+5), copper/tin 5 (= 3+2), iron/zinc 9 (5+1+3), etc. Thus 'the force or impulsion with which two metals act on the electric fluid is equal to the sum of the forces of the series of metals which stands between them, and...the electric force is the same as that which arises when the two extreme metals have no effect on the force of the latter'. This is the first statement of what Maxwell called 'Volta'slaw of contact electricity'..."(Partington IV, p.15.).

The First Publication of an Image of a Photograph, April 20, 1839

JF Ptak Science Books

The first published photographic image,  or "sunpicture", illustrating an excellent collection of extremely early papers on photography, 1839.

Bird, Golding.  "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing."  Five papers in a series found and bound in the London-published journal, The Mirror.  These five issues comprise a very early work on the new science of photography by Dr. Golding Bird, appearing in issues from April 20-May 25, 1839:  this includes "A treatise on photogenic drawing",  (pp. 241-44);  and also  "The new art - photography",  (pp. 261-2, 281-3, 317-18, 333-335.)

It is page 241 (issue no. 945, Saturday April 20) that particularly peaked my interest--it contains the First Image of a Photogenic Drawing. This is essentially the first publication of an image produced by any sort of photographic process.  The process here is the 'sun picture", a photographic process, making this the first published "photographic" image, but really it is more like the first publication of a photographic image that was produced via woodcut.  It predates the first mass-published photograph by four years and the first (entirely) photographically illustrated book (The Pencil of Nature) by six years.  The sun picture, or heliotype, was first described in print in 1801 by both Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Davy, and although the process was at least 39 years old at this time there are no recorded *published* images produced by that process. (The woodcut is much larger than usual for The Mirror, and is also of a unique brown/red color, and of a different hue than any other woodcut that we have seen in any of the issues of the first 45 years of this publication.)

The image is described in David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical Reproduction, located in
 the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts), so:

"...facsimile of a photogenic drawing of ferns (done on the block) as a plate [to illustrate an article serialized by Dr. Golding Bird "A Treatise on Photogenic Drawing" and reprinted in the Magazine of Natural History, p. 234-44]...printed in rust to imitate the photogenic drawing... The facsimile of the photogenic drawing done directly from an exposure on the block is the first photographic image published. The finished example is printed directly from the block in a reddish brown to match the color of Talbot's first salt print photograms."--Hanson Collection catalog, p. 6 [Source, here.]

Under the title, "the First Reproduction of a Photograph",the George Eastman House of Photography's journal, the Image (volume 11/2, 1962)  notes:

"On April 20, 1839, the London magazine The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, featured as its cover a "Facsimile of a Photogenic Drawing." There is a copy in the George Eastman House collection. It is a picture —in negative—of three stalks of leaves. The original was made by Golding Bird, "a distinguished botanist" by following William Henry Fox Talbot's newly invented process, the details of which were made public at the Royal Society on February 21. Paper was made light sensitive by bathing it first in sodium chloride solution, then, after sponging the surface, in a solution of silver nitrate. The material could be used in two ways: to make, as Golding Bird did, a contact print, pressing flat objects to the surface during exposure to light, or in a camera. Both techniques produced negative images, which were fixed in a strong solution of sodium chloride. Talbot named his invention "photogenic drawing." His friend, Sir John Herschel, proposed for it the word "photography."

"Thus to The Mirror falls the honor of having first published a reproduction of a photograph. The facsimile which was presented to its readers was the work of a draftsman, who made a drawing of the photograph, and a wood engraver, who cut the block..”

The Image continues:

"Only a week later, on April 27, The Magazine of Science and School of Arts, another London magazine, featured three "Fac-similes of Photogenic Drawings" on its cover: two botanical specimens; (Fool's Parsley and Grass of Parnassus), and a piece of lace. Although wood engravings created by skill of hand, they approach photography more closely. For the very wooden block used for the printing plate was itself sensitized, just as Bird's paper had been sensitized, and the engraver followed with his burin the photographic image itself, rather than the artist's drawing."

"The photogenic drawings were contributed to the magazine by a reader who signed himself "G.F." He commented, in his covering letter published in the same issue: "I send you three drawings of this new art, which were impressed at once on box-wood, and therefore are fit for the graver, without any other preparation. I flatter myself that this process may be useful to carvers and wood engravers, not only to those who cut the fine objects of artistical design, but still more to those who cut patterns and blocks for lace, muslin, calico-printing, paper-hanging, &c., as by this simple means the errors, expense, and time of the draughtsman may be wholly saved, and in a minute or two the most elaborate picture or design, or the most complicated machinery, be delineated with the utmost truth and clearness."

Gernsheim states in his History of Photography that  the first photographic camera ever made for sale to the public was advertised by Francis West, an optician of 83 Fleet Street, London, and published in this issue.   

Bird later reworked these sections of the Mirror into elements of and a chapter in his Elements of Natural Philosophy; (being an experimental introduction to the study of the physical sciences; revised and enlarged third London edition, Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848). This article was reproduced in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in September 1839 as "Observations on the Application of Heliographic or Photogenic Drawing to Botanical Purposes; with an account of an economic mode of preparing the Paper: "in a Letter to the Editor of the magazine of Natural History"

Published in the volume containing a half-year of The Mirror, in original leather and boards.  Ex-library, with scant markings. Good condition. [On hold/inquire.]

The Foundations of Electrochemistry, 1808

Davy, Humphrey. "Ueber die chemischen Wirkungen der Electricität. (Vorgelesen in der königl. Societät zu London, als Bakerian Lecture am 20sten Novemb. 1806)". In: Annalen der Physik, (Halle, Rengerschen Buchhandlung, 1808) , Series I/band 28, parts 1+2 with1 engraved plate. Davy's paper occupies pp 1-43. and pp. 161-202.

We offer the entire issue for the full half-year, with all four original front and rear wrappers bound in, and as such is quite rare. Very good condition. $750

First German edition.
"Humphrey Davy...was among the first to investigate the decomposition of water. In 1806 he delivered a Bakerian Lecture (the paper offered here in the German version) before the Royal Society of London "On some chemical agencies of electricity" (1807), which pointed out several fallacies in the theory of electrolysis. Davy's experiments on the chemical effects of electrical currents on substances, causing their decomposition, led to his discovery of several new elements: potassium (1807), sodium (1807), barium (1808), calcium (1808), and boron (1808)" (Milestone of Science No. 52) Partington vol. IV 42; PMM No 255 (note).

Condition:  Ex-libris Deutsche Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung, then Wright Patterson Field Library (USAF), then Library of Congress.  Library markings:  small gilt-stamped "Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung", page edges stamped "Wright Field Library/Dayton, Ohio" on top and bottom. Contents quite nice.