De jons michael (2 résultats)

Etat : Good. Suzanne Bastedo (illustrateur).

DOCUMENTING THE BIRTH OF ELECTRODYNAMICS. A beautiful copy bound in contemporary red morocco of the definitive version of this continually evolving collection of important memoirs on electrodynamics by Ampère (1775-1836) and others over the period 1820-1823, beginning with his 'Premier Mémoire', the "first great memoir on electrodynamics" (DSB). "Ampère had originally intended the collection to contain all the articles published on his theory of electrodynamics since 1820, but as he prepared copy new articles on the subject continued to appear, so that the fascicles, which apparently began publication in 1821, were in a constant state of revision, with at least five versions of the collection appearing between 1821 and 1823 under different titles" (Norman). Some of the 25 pieces in the collection are published here for the first time, others appeared earlier in journals such as Arago's Annales de Chimie et de Physique and the Journal de Physique. But even the articles that had appeared earlier are modified for the Receuil, or have additional notes by Ampère, to reflect his progress and changes in viewpoint in the intervening period. Many of the articles that are new to the present work concern Ampère's reaction to Faraday's first paper on electromagnetism, 'On some new electro-magnetical motions, and on the theory of magnetism', originally published in the 21 October 1821 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Science, which records the first conversion of electrical into mechanical energy and contains the first enunciation of the notion of a line of force. Faraday's work on electromagnetic rotations would lead him to become the principal opponent of Ampère's mathematically formulated explanation of electromagnetism as a manifestation of currents of electrical fluids surrounding 'electrodynamic' molecules. The Receuil contains the first French translation of Faraday's paper followed by extended notes by Ampère and his brilliant student Félix Savary (1797-1841). Ampère's reaction to Faraday's criticisms are the subject of several of the articles in the second half of the Receuil. The collection also includes Ampère's important response to a letter from the Dutch physicist Albert van Beek (1787-1856), in which "Ampère argued eloquently for his model, insisting that it could be used to explain not only magnetism but also chemical combination and elective affinity. In short, it was to be considered the foundation of a new theory of matter. This was one of the reasons why Ampère's theory of electrodynamics was not immediately and universally accepted. To accept it meant to accept as well a theory of the ultimate structure of matter itself" (DSB). The volume concludes with a résumé of a paper read by Savary to the Académie des Sciences on 3 February 1823, and a letter from Ampère to Faraday, dated 18 April 1823 (which does not appear in the Table of Contents), showing that this definitive version of the Receuil was in fact published in 1823. Only three other copies of this work listed by ABPC/RBH. Provenance: Marcel Gompel (1883-1944) (ex-libris on front paste-down - Répertoire général des ex-libris français: G1896). A Jewish professor at the Collège de France, Gompel worked in the Laboratoire d'Histoire naturelle des corps organisés from 1922 to 1940, under the direction of André Mayer. In World War II he became a hero of the French resistance and was finally tortured and executed on orders from Klaus Barbie, the chief of the Gestapo in Lyon. When Barbie came to trial, the prosecutors used Gompel's case as a particularly clear and egregious example of his guilt of crimes against humanity. His superb library was stolen by the Nazis. The collection opens with the 'Premier Mémoire' [1] (numbering as in the list of contents, below), first published in Arago's Annales at the end of 1820. This was Ampère's "first great memoir on electrodynamics" (DSB), representing his first response to the demonstration on 21 April 1820 by the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) that electric currents create magnetic fields; this had been reported by François Arago (1786-1853) to an astonished Académie des Sciences on 4 September. In this memoir Ampère "demonstrated for the first time that two parallel conductors, carrying currents traveling in the same direction, attract each other; conversely, if the currents are traveling in opposite directions, they repel each other" (Sparrow, Milestones, p. 33). The first quantitative expression for the force between current carrying conductors appeared in Ampère's less well-known 'Note sur les expériences électro-magnétiques' [2], which originally appeared in the Annales des Mines. Ampère stated, without proof, that, if two infinitely small portions of electric current A and B, with intensities g and h, separated by a distance r, set at angles ? and ? to AB and in directions which created with AB two planes at an angle ? with each other, the action they exert on each other is gh (sin ? sin ? sin ? + k cos ? cos ?)/r2, where k is an unknown constant which he stated could 'conveniently' be taken to be zero. This last assumption was an error which significantly retarded his progress in the next two years before he stated correctly that k = ? 1/2 in his article [13], published for the first time in the Receuil. This article comprised 'notes' on a lecture [12] delivered to the Institut in April 1822 in which he surveyed experimental work carried out by himself and others since 1821 (he also published for the first time there the words 'electro-static' and 'electro-dynamic'). The full theoretical and experimental proof of the correct value of k appeared in two articles in Arago's Annales in 1822, [19] and [20], in an article by Savary [22], and in experiments with de la Rive [17] (see below). On 20 January 1821 Ampère performed an experiment together with César-Mansuète Despretz (1798-1863) intended to support his own theory of the interaction of electric currents again. Signed.…