Search Results: Authors starting with J from The Manhattan Rare Book Company

Menasha, Wi: Institute Of Radio Engineers, 1932,, 1932. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Karl Jansky's ground-breaking papers announcing the discovery of radio astronomy, a new science that has become one of the essential methods for making modern astronomical observations. Working at Bell Labs, Jansky "was given the task of investigating factors that could interfere with radio waves used for long-distance communication. He designed a linear directional antenna, which, mounted on wheels from a Model T Ford, could scan the sky. He indentified all the sources of interference, such as thunderstorms, except for one weak emission. This he found to be unconnected with the Sun and in 1931 he discovered that the radio interference came from the stars. Jansky published his findings in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers in December 1932 ['Directional Studies of Atmospherics at High Frequencies'], the date that marks precisely the beginnings of radio… Read More

London: Taylor & Francis, 1870. First edition. Original wrappers. Fine. A LANDMARK IN COMPUTER SCIENCE: FIRST EDITION OF JEVONS'S PRESENTATION AND EXPLANATION OF HIS "LOGICAL PIANO", THE FIRST MACHINE TO SOLVE A MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM AT SUPERHUMAN SPEED. Jevons invented a "logical piano" (so named because it resembled a small upright piano) that could perform, through a sequence of switches, various types of logical calculations. In doing so, he became "the first person to construct a machine with sufficient power to solve a complicated problem faster than the problem could be solved without the machine's aid" (Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann ). "From his thinking on the processes of logical inference, [Jevons] developed the idea that these might be performed mechanically. As early as 1865 he was trying to build a 'reasoning machine, or logical abacus' (Papers, 4.69), which evolved through several stages into a 'logical… Read More

np: Tektronix, 1973. First edition. original casing. Very Good. USED TO LAUNCH THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, TWICE: This oscilloscope was used to design Pong, the birth of the video game industry, and the Apple II, the first personal computer with hi-res color graphics. The present oscilloscope is a remarkable artifact, having played a critical role in launching two of the most consequential products in the history of the digital revolution: Atari's Pong and the Apple II computer. Very few artifacts of comparable importance to the digital revolution have come to market. In 1970, Tektronix introduced the Tektronix 465, a powerful and portable transistorized oscilloscope that quickly became the standard instrument for digital logic designers. In 1972 Atari purchased a 465 - the very oscilloscope offered here - for their chief engineer, Al Alcorn. I. THIS OSCILLOSCOPE WAS USED BY AL ALCORN TO DESIGN THE GAME PONG: The introduction of Pong in 1972 marked the birth of the video game industry. Several years… Read More

London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, et al., 1755. First edition. Calf. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF JOHNSON'S LANDMARK DICTIONARY. A monumental work by anyone's standards, Johnson's Dictionary took over eight years to complete. "With no real library at hand, Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words... illustrating the senses in which these words could be used by including about 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing in every field of learning during the two centuries from the middle of the Elizabethan period down to his own time" (W. Jackson Bate). "Johnson introduced into English lexicography principles which had already been accepted in Europe but were quite novel in mid-eighteenth-century England. He codified the spelling of English words; he gave full and lucid definitions of their meanings (often entertainingly coloured by his High Church and Tory propensities); and he adduced extensive and apt illustrations from a wide range of authoritative writers... His… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927. First edition. Original wrappers. Fine. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Jordan and Klein's introduction of the "second quantization"; one of the founding papers of quantum field theory. FROM THE LIBRARY OF NIELS BOHR, with his stamp on the front wrapper. In Jordan's "paper with Klein, written while the two of them were in Copenhagen in the spring of 1927, a generalization of Dirac's treatment of bosons was given to allow for the interaction of the bosons with one another. Their point of departure was a Schrödinger equation for the field operator containing a nonlinear term to account for the interaction of the field itself... "The equivalence of this description with that using symmetric wave functions in configuration space was established. The 'particles' that emerged from the imposition of the quantum condition (commutation rules) on the field variables thus obeyed Bose statistics. Heisenberg found the… Read More

London: Richard and John E. Taylor. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS of Joule's most developed and complete account of the results of his famous "paddle-wheel" experiments; includes his most accurate determination of what would later be known as the "Joule." "Joule began work about 1845 on a fourth method for determining the mechanical value of heat. His latest efforts received a polite but unremarkable reception at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association. This time the experiments involved a paddle wheel placed in a can filled with water. Weights attached over pulleys working in opposite directions communicated motion to the paddle wheel. Joule argued that 'the force spent in revolving the paddle wheel produced a certain increment in the temperature of the water'..." Although Joule's work with the paddle wheel was largely ignored throughout the late 1840's, he continued to work on the experiments… Read More

London: Richard and John E. Taylor. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine. FIRST EDITION of the derivation of Joule's Law, one of the fundamental laws of electricity. Joule, "in the paper now under consideration, was the first to announce the definite law that 'when a current of voltaic electricity is propagated along a metallic conductor, the heat evolved in a given time is proportional to the resistance of the conductor multiplied by the square of the electric intensity,' i.e. electric current. In the same paper he showed that the law applies, when proper allowance is made for certain disturbances, to heat produced in electrolytes. The paper also contained the first reference to a 'standard of resistance;' this consisted of a coil of ten feet of copper wire .024 inch in thickness. "These experiments contained the germs of Joule's second great discovery, the equivalence of heat and energy, which he fully developed later. But he had already made it clear that the energy… Read More