Details
HAUKSBEE, FRANCIS. Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects. Containing An Account of several Surprizing Phenomena Touching Light and Electricity. London: by R. Brugis for the Author 1709. Small 4to, 200 x 152 mm. (7 7/8 x 6 in.), contemporary red goatskin, covers gilt with triple roll-tooled panels, the middle panel with foliate tools at corners and clusters of volutes at center of each side, spine in six densely gold-tooled compartments, the second gilt lettered, g.e., joints and extremities rubbed, small chip at head of spine, lacking first and last blank leaves as usual, several small holes to plate 2, 5 plates with short tears at mounts not affecting images, some minor mostly marginal spotting to text. FIRST EDITION, single small engraved plate bound between pp. 160 and 161, 7 folding plates of experimental apparatuses. Duveen pp. 281-2 ("one of the most important early works on electricity"); Norman 1020; E.G.R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England, (Cambridge 1954) 590; Wheeler Gift 232.
Hauksbee was indebted to Isaac Newton for some of his theoretical ideas, while the results of his experiments in electroluminescence, static electricity and capillarity in turn influenced Newton' s revisions and additions to the new editions of the Principia and Opticks. Hauksbee was the first to demonstrate the optical effects produced by the passage of electricity through rarified air, produced through friction, which he demonstrated in numerous experiments using a machine with a glass cylinder of his own invention, "open[ing] the way for the work of Gray, Dufay and Franklin...His discoveries in capillarity (he was the first adequately to explore the subject) influenced Laplace nearly one hundred years later" (Norman).
Provenance: Desmond Geoghegan, armorial bookplate.
Hauksbee was indebted to Isaac Newton for some of his theoretical ideas, while the results of his experiments in electroluminescence, static electricity and capillarity in turn influenced Newton' s revisions and additions to the new editions of the Principia and Opticks. Hauksbee was the first to demonstrate the optical effects produced by the passage of electricity through rarified air, produced through friction, which he demonstrated in numerous experiments using a machine with a glass cylinder of his own invention, "open[ing] the way for the work of Gray, Dufay and Franklin...His discoveries in capillarity (he was the first adequately to explore the subject) influenced Laplace nearly one hundred years later" (Norman).
Provenance: Desmond Geoghegan, armorial bookplate.