KIRCHHOFF, G. (GUSTAV ROBERT). - KIRCHHOFF'S CIRCUIT-LAW PRESENTED.

Ueber die Bewegung der Elektricität in Leitern.

(Leipzig, Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1857). Without wrappers. In "Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Hrsg. von J.C. Poggendorff", Bd. 102, No 12. Pp. 481-644 a. 1 folded engraved plate. (Entire issue offered). Kirchhoff's paper: pp. 529-545. Clean and fine.

Firs appearance of Kirchhoff's first paper on conductivity in which he presents his Circuit-Law. The significance of this paper is that Kirchhoff proved with action at a distance that electric disturbances travel along wires of neglible resistance with the velocity of light. He accomplished this with the laws of Newtonian electrodynamics before Maxwell formulated his equations.

"The theory of variable currents raised more difficult problems. The law of dynamical interactions between currents had been formulated by Ampere (1826) in the spirit of the concept of action at a distance....The field was still open when Kirchhoff entered it in 1857 with his own general theory of the motion of electricity in conductors (in the paper offered). His first paper, in which he treated linear conductors from the same premises as Weber, turned out to coincide in all essentials with an investigation carried out by Weber shortly before but delayed in publication. Both physicists noticed a remarkable implication of their theory: in a perfectly conducting circuit, oscillating currents could be propagated with a constant velocity, independent of the nature of the conductors, and numerically equal to the velocity of light. Both Weber and Kirchhoff however, pointing to the extreme character of the condition of infinite conductivity, dismissed this result as a mere accidental coincidence."(DSB VII, p. 380-81).

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