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The Origins of Cyberspace collection described as lots 1-255 will first be offered as a single lot, subject to a reserve price. If this price is not reached, the collection will be immediately offered as individual lots as described in the catalogue as lots 1-255.
PASCAL, Blaise (1623-62). Oeuvres. Edited by Charles Bossut (1730-1814). The Hague: Detune, 1779.
Details
PASCAL, Blaise (1623-62). Oeuvres. Edited by Charles Bossut (1730-1814). The Hague: Detune, 1779.
5 volumes, 8o. Contemporary mottled calf, gilt spines.
FIRST EDITION of Pascal's collected works and the earliest obtainable edition of Pascal's text on his calculating machine known as the "Pascaline that he invented when he was 19 years old. Of the original 18-page pamphlet about the machine that Pascal had privately printed in 1645, only two copies are cited in OCLC in one French library. No copies are cited in North America. In the collected works this pamphlet is reprinted with additional material. Pascal designed his first mechanical adding machines in 1642. He was not the first to design and construct a mechanical calculator. After 1599 Galileo Galilei had designed and sold about three hundred copies of his geometric and military compass, an analog calculating device, best known as the sector. Napier had made a step in the direction of a mechanical calculator with the "promptuary" described in his Rabdologia though this was not strictly a mechanical device; and around 1620 Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), a professor at the University of Tübingen and friend of the astronomer Kepler, produced the first workable calculating machine. However, Schickard's accomplishment was destined for historical obscurity: he built only two examples of his machine, neither of which survived, and the unpublished drawings for its construction were lost to posterity for over three hundred years, being discovered only in 1957. In contrast, Pascal constructed about fifty examples of his machine, of which several are extant; and the machine was well known to the cognoscenti, both through Pascal's own efforts (he hoped to make a profit selling them) and through Diderot's later description of it in the Encyclopiédie (1751). (Williams 1985, 130-33). OOC 13.
5 volumes, 8
FIRST EDITION of Pascal's collected works and the earliest obtainable edition of Pascal's text on his calculating machine known as the "Pascaline that he invented when he was 19 years old. Of the original 18-page pamphlet about the machine that Pascal had privately printed in 1645, only two copies are cited in OCLC in one French library. No copies are cited in North America. In the collected works this pamphlet is reprinted with additional material. Pascal designed his first mechanical adding machines in 1642. He was not the first to design and construct a mechanical calculator. After 1599 Galileo Galilei had designed and sold about three hundred copies of his geometric and military compass, an analog calculating device, best known as the sector. Napier had made a step in the direction of a mechanical calculator with the "promptuary" described in his Rabdologia though this was not strictly a mechanical device; and around 1620 Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), a professor at the University of Tübingen and friend of the astronomer Kepler, produced the first workable calculating machine. However, Schickard's accomplishment was destined for historical obscurity: he built only two examples of his machine, neither of which survived, and the unpublished drawings for its construction were lost to posterity for over three hundred years, being discovered only in 1957. In contrast, Pascal constructed about fifty examples of his machine, of which several are extant; and the machine was well known to the cognoscenti, both through Pascal's own efforts (he hoped to make a profit selling them) and through Diderot's later description of it in the Encyclopiédie (1751). (Williams 1985, 130-33). OOC 13.
Further details
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