"THE NEWTON OF ELECTRICITY" - THE CARDINAL FORMULAS OF ELECTRO-DYNAMICS

AMPÈRE, ANDRÉ-MARIE.

Mémoire sur une nouvelle Expérience électrodynamique, sur son application à la formule qui représente l'action mutuelle de deux élemend de conducteurs voltaïques, et sur de nouvelles conséquences déduites de cette formule. (Lu à l'Academie royale des Sciences, dans la séance du 12 septembre 1825). (+) Suite Du Mémoire de M. Ampère sur une nouvelle Expérience.....(+) Lettre de M. Ampère à M. Gerhardi sur divers phénoménes électro-dynamiques.

Paris, Crochard, 1825.

8vo. 2 contemporary half calfs w. richly gilt spines. Light wear at top of spines. Minor scratches to upper compartments of spines. Small stamps on verso of title-pages and verso of plates. In: "Annales de Chimie et de Physique, Par MM. Gay-Lussac et Arago.", tome 29 a. 30. - 448 pp. and 3 folded engraved plates + 448 pp. and 2 folded engraved plates. (The entire volumes offered). Ampère's papers: pp. 381-404 (tome 29) + Suite pp. 29-41 (tome 30) + "Lettre à Gerhardi": pp. 373-381 (tome 29). Clean and fine throughout.

First appearance of this famous memoir, in which Ampère presented his collected results on electrodynamics to the French Academy, creating the foundation of 19th century developments in electricity and magnetism. In the words of James Clark Maxwell, "We can scarcely believe that Ampère really discovered the law of action by means of the experiments which he describes. We are led to suspect, what, indeed, he tells us himself, that he discovered the law by some process which he has not shown us, and that when he had afterwards built up a pefect demonstration he removed all traces of the scaffolding by which he raised it."

The offered memoir was published BEFORE the famous "Theorie mathématique des phénomènes électro-dynamiques uniquement déduite de L'expérience", which did not appear until 1827. That 1827-Memoire incorporates, together with a new presentation of Ampère's results from 1820, 1822, 1823, the offered memoir (1825). (Horblit: 100 - Dibner: 62).

"From 1814 until 1820 Ampére did not perform the kind of research that would have made it into the annals of the histrory of science, but on September 11, 1820 when he heard Francois Arago speak about Oersted's work, he got fresh inspiration and started the work that made him famous. Arago related how Oersted had found that a steady electric current influences the orientation of a compass needle. After a weak Ampère had determined experimentally that that two straight, parallel, and current-carrying, wires execute a force on each other. The magnitude of the force is inversely proportional to the distance between the wires and proportional to the strenghts of the current..... During the following years he continued his researches, both experimentally and theoretically. he built an instrument for measuring electricity that later was developed into the galvanometer. Finally in 1825 he presented his collected results to the Academy IN ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED MEMOIRS IN THE HISTORY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY (The paper offered)." (Citizen's Compendium, p. 2). - Norman No 47.

The volumes contain many other notable papers by: Wöhler, Fresnel, Marcet, Berzelius, Felix Savart, De la Rive, Braconnet, Boussingault, Magnus, Poncelet, Vaugelin, Poisson, Gay-Lussac, Faraday, Laplace etc.

Order-nr.: 43749