Search Results: Titles starting with T from Atticus Rare Books

New York: AIEE. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS OF 2 RARE OFFPRINTS (1st separate ed) BY WILLIAM J. HAMMER. THE 1903 IS THE 1st PRINTING OF THE LECTURE WHICH LATER THAT SAME YEAR WOULD BECOME "THE 1st BOOK PUBLISHED ON RADIUM" (Smithsonian Archive). THE 2nd OFFPRINT IS A SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY TO BECQUEREL. FURTHER, IT CONTAINS A 2 PAGE APPENDIX BY PIERRE CURIE WRITTEN THE SAME YEAR THE CURIES SUCCESSFULLY ISOLATED RADIOACTIVE RADIUM SALTS. Hammer carried on a "lifelong association with the foremost scientists of his day -- Edison, Bell, Maxim, the Curies, the Wright brothers, and others" (ibid). In April 1903 the pioneering American electrical engineer William Joseph Hammer delivered a lecture, "Radium and Other Radioactive Substances..." at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He included 38 slides, most photographic; 32 are included in the offprint with no evidence any are missing. Many are photos of scanned images of mice; some photos of lab equipment. The printed book - issued after… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPS OF TWO PAPERS: DONALD GLASER'S BRIEF 1952 ANNOUNCEMENT OF HIS FIRST EXPERIMENT WITH HIS BUBBLE CHAMBER & HIS 1953 PAPER FULLY DESCRIBING HIS INVENTION AND SUMMARIZING ITS USE IN OBSERVING AND PHOTOGRAPHING THE TRACKS AND LIFETIMES OF PARTICLES. Glaser's invention was a major breakthrough in sub-atomic particle physics. His "investigation of interactions involving short-lived particles, [facilitated] the discoveries by Luis Alvarez and others at Lawrence- Berkeley National Laboratories, among others" (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention. "American physicist and neurobiologist Donald Arthur Glaser undertook a search for a better mechanism for tracking small charged particles, and settled on the idea of a superheated liquid. He found the published version of a 1924 study of superheated liquids and realized that the random beginning of… Read More

GORGEOUS HAND-COLORED EARLY 18th c. DOUBLE HEMISPHERE MAP OF THE SURFACE OF THE MOON - based upon the models of Johannes Hevelius and Giovanni Riccioli, this map is the first comparative chart of the Moon. Both spheres illustrate the same side of the Moon and each is topographically detailed, offering a greater than 360 degree viewing with all visible features weighted equally. The left hand map is by Hevelius with place names rendered in his nomenclature; the right hand map is by Riccioli with place names rendered in his nomenclature. Though the two systems of naming would go on to compete with each other for another 140 years, eventually Hevelius' Latin names gave way to those of Riccioli's (and those names remain in use today). The map measures a full 20.5 x 23.5 inches (52.07 x 59.69cm) and first appeared in 1707 in Johann Baptist Homann's Neuer Atlas, then again in 1742 as plate no. 11 in Doppelmayr's important Atlas Coelestis. Because both were published by Homann's Nuremburg firm, there is… Read More

1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF A LENGTHY ILLUSTRATED ARTICLE ON THE EMERGING TECHNOLOGY OF WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY, then an experimental technology for transmitting telegraphy signals without wires (including radiotelegraphy). THE ARTICLE INCLUDES AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCONI. The article also describes the experiments of Hertz and Bose. Single issue housed in custom case. In the late 19th century, the distance between the transmitter and receiver progressively increased "to the point that the inventor's assistants finally found themselves at the upslope of the Celestini Hill (Fig. 4), situated about one mile from Villa Griffone. According to what was reported in an interview published in 1897 by English journalist H. J. W. Dam, Marconi declared that in September 1895, one of his receivers, which had been placed on the other side of the hill, reacted to the signals transmitted from Villa Griffone. During 1896, Marconi moved to Great Britain, where on June 2, he filed a patent entitled… Read More

London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1926. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF THE FIRST BOOK IN ENGLISH ON TELEVISION. Handsomely cased in a pristine custom clamshell case, gilt-lettered at the spine and on the front board. Near fine. In 1922, Alfred Dinsdale (1896-1974) began a serious study of "the problems of transmitting and receiving visual signals, namely, television. His resources were small and he lacked any formal research training; he also did not have access to workshop or laboratory facilities and his financial position was precarious. Regardless, Dinsdale rented an attic and began to assemble apparatus using what were, on the face of it, most unpromising materials. "Dinsdale describes the technical problems faced by early experimenters (Jan Van Szczepanik, Boris Rosing, Denoys Von Mihaly and others), but focuses primarily on the work of the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird (1888-1946), the first person to produce televised pictures of objects in motion. In February 1924… Read More

London: Royal Society. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF ALL 10 OF CAYLEY'S ‘MEMOIRS ON QUANTICS', a complete set extracted from 1854 to 1878 Philosophical Transactions and handsomely bound in half calf over period appropriate boards. Included are Introductory Memoir upon Quantics, 1854, 13 pages; 2nd Memoir, 1855, 25 pages; 3rd, 1856, 20 pages; 4th, 1858, 12 pages; 5th, 1858, 31 pages; 6th, 1859, 29 pages; 7th, 1861, 15 pages; 8th, 1867, 41 pages; 9th, 1870, 33 pages; 10th, 1878, 58 pages. Quantics is "a term [Cayley] coined for algebraic forms, now referred to as multilinear homogeneous algebraic forms" (Princeton). Beginning in 1854, Cayley composed a series of 10 memoirs, the last published in 1878. For mathematicians at large, Cayley's efforts "constituted a brilliant and influential account of [quantics] theory as he and others were developing it. The results Cayley was obtaining impressed mathematicians by their unexpectedness and elegance" (DSB, III, 165). The ‘Sixth Memoir' is the best… Read More

Hanover: Carl Meyer, 1865. 1st German Edition. HANDSOMELY BOUND FIRST GERMAN EDITION (INCLUSIVE OF ITS ORIGINAL WRAPS) OF GAUSS' MASTERFUL WORK ON CELESTIAL MECHANICS & MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS. The work was first published in Latin in 1809 as "Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectinibus conicis solem ambientum" ["Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies Moving about the Sun in Conic Sections"]. Gauss' work systematically develops his methods of orbital calculation and demonstrated his ability to accurately calculate and predict orbital location, including the theory and use of least squares," which is here applied for the first time (DSB). It introduced the Gaussian gravitational constant along with the first application of the normal distribution to observational errors" (History of Science: The Wenner Collection). The astronomical methodology Gauss described in Theory Motus required only a few modifications for use with computers and is still in use today. Gauss believed that "the… Read More

FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE INTRODUCTION OF SLATER DETERMINANTS, now universally named for him and still employed. Many consider this Slater's greatest paper. Working at Harvard, the physicist John Clarke Slater "published the construction as an answer to the complicated group theoretical constructions for anti-symmetric wave functions that had been introduced by Hermann Weyl and Eugene Wigner in the 1920s" (The Citizen's Compendium). The construction Slater created produced the determinantal expression for an anti-symmetric wave function. A Slater determinant, then, is a simple and approximate expression for a wave function of a multi-fermion system - usually one that is a multi-electron system. It "automatically satisfy[ies] the requirements of the exclusion principle, including spin" and is of help in illustrating important properties of a many-particle wave-function (The Physical Review, The First Hundred Years, 86). Put another way: Constructed from a single spin-orbital product -… Read More

London: Royal Society, 1939. 1st Edition. Bound, ex-libris copy of the FIRST EDITION of Nevill Mott's theory of rectification by metal-semiconductor junctions. "In solid-state physics, a metal-semiconductor junction is a type of junction in which a metal comes in close contact with a semiconductor material. It is the oldest practical semiconductor device. "The first theory that predicted the correct direction of rectification of the metal semiconductor junction was given by Mott in 1939 [in this work]. He found the solution for both the diffusion and drift currents of the majority carriers through the semiconductor surface space charge layer" (Wikipedia). Mott also worked on nuclear and collision theory and developed a theory of transition metals. Mott was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for "fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems" (Nobel Prize Committee). CONDITION & DETAILS: London: The Royal Society. Complete volume. 4to. 9.75 by 7… Read More

Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard Ltd, 1952. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF "THE FIRST PAPER PUBLISHED IN A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ON THE APPLICATION OF AN ELECTRONIC COMPUTER TO COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY" AND CRYSTAL-STRUCTURE INVESTIGATION (Christies, Origin of Cyberspace Auction, 2005, 139). A brief summary was published in the Manchester Conference Proceedings, but this paper was intended for X-ray crystallographers and is far more thorough. Working together at the Cavendish Laboratory, the English biochemists John Bennett and John Kendrew "wrote the first program for three-dimensional Fourier calculations" which Kendrew then ran on the an early British computer, EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) "in order to solve the structure of the protein myoglobin" (ibid). "During the 1940s the limitation of human calculation ability was reached in solving the structures of molecules with about 10 distinct atoms. The production of electron density maps for structure analysis… Read More

1883. 1st Edition. Second, deluxe edition of "Ampère's greatest work," Theorie Mathematique... or Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience (DSB). Widely referred to as "the Principia of Electrodynamics," with this work Ampère founded the science of electrodynamics, now known as electromagnetism. "Volta's invention of the pile c. 1800 made it possible to experiment with steady electric currents and led to Oersted's discovery, in 1820" of an action of electricity on magnets that suggested "the presence of a magnetic force that is perpendicular both to the direction of the wire and to the shortest line from the wire to the magnet" - to the orientation one would expect. (Torretti, The Philosophy of Physics, 82). "Ampère, after an extraordinary bout of experimentation and mathematical theorizing, succeeded in explaining electromagnetic interaction by central forces acting at a distance... Ampère accounts for all electrodynamic and… Read More

Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1955. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A CLASSIC PAPER ON THE PROBLEM OF CAPITAL BUDGETING, THE 1955 FIRST PRESENTATION OF THE "LORIE-SAVAGE PROBLEM". In this paper, Lorie and Savage use integer programming (Lagrangian methods in discrete optimization approach) to introduce the topic of capital budgeting and present their approach for making project selections to maximize value along with three examples to illustrate the approach. Note that this entire issue of The Journal of Business is devoted to capital budgeting and also includes papers by Solomon, Gordon, Dean and Smith, Shillinglaw, Hill, Norton, and Villers. Project selection is a major problem in managerial decision making. Capital budgeting problems determine which project to fund given constraints on available capital. The much studied "Lorie-Savage Problem" [also known as the Lorie and Savage Problem or the Lorie-Savage Paradox], is the problem of choosing among competitive investment… Read More

1st Edition. Two volume first edition of a milestone in the history of structural biology, the first protein structure ever discovered. Kendrew's papers present the first solution of the three-dimensional molecular structure of a protein. "Kendrew's discovery was one of the greatest landmarks in the history of molecular biology" (Jeremy Norman History of Science). Along with his colleague Max Perutz, Kendrew received the 1952 Nobel Prize for this work. Two discoveries laid the foundation for Kendrew's work: "first, that the positions of atoms in a crystallized substance could be determined from X-rays passing through, and scattered by, the crystal; second, that the approach could be applied to very simple biological molecules (Garwin, Century of Nature, 88). The goal of Kendrew's team, composed mostly of physicists, was to understand how a biological molecule such as a protein works, beginning with how it is built. The papers they produced (both offered here) are "the outcome of a truly Herculean… Read More

New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Co, 1941. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION (full volume) OF A PAPER CITED BY CLAUDE SHANNON "AS ONE OF HIS SOURCES OF THE SAMPLING THEOREM" (Butzera, Multiplex signal transmission and the development of sampling techniques" Applicable Analysis, January 2008, 1437). One year after publication of his seminal 1948 paper - a proof of his sampling theorem -- Shannon wrote that Bennett [in the paper offered here] had established "a result similar to Theorem 1 [his own sampling theorem]" (C.E. Shannon, Proc. IRE 37, 1949, pp. 10-21). Notably, Shannon's paper - by any measure seminal - only cited ten other papers, two of them his own. Bennett's paper, in other words, was one of only eight included. Note that we also offer this item in its original paper wrappers. "In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals. It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that… Read More

New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Co, 1941. 1st Edition. IN ORIGINAL PAPER WRAPS, the FIRST EDITION OF A PAPER CITED BY CLAUDE SHANNON "AS ONE OF HIS SOURCES OF THE SAMPLING THEOREM" (Butzera, Multiplex signal transmission and the development of sampling techniques" Applicable Analysis, January 2008, 1437). One year after publication of his seminal 1948 paper - a proof of his sampling theorem -- Shannon wrote that Bennett [in the paper offered here] had established "a result similar to Theorem 1 [his own sampling theorem]" (C.E. Shannon, Proc. IRE 37, 1949, pp. 10-21). Notably, Shannon's paper - by any measure seminal - only cited ten other papers, two of them his own. Bennett's paper, in other words, was one of only eight to make the cut. Note that we also offer this paper in its bound form. "In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals. It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample… Read More

New York: America Association for the Advancement of Science, 2005. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS: AHARONOV & ZUBAIRY'S 2005 PAPER ON THE QUANTUM ERASER EXPERIMENT. Their paper provides salient history and perspective on, just as the name of the paper alludes, time and the quantum. Specifically, the authors address Scully and Drühl's quantum eraser experiment - the first successful "quantum eraser" experiment and one that incorporated concepts considered in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. In 1978, Einstein's last collaborator John Wheeler conducted a milestone thought experiment that has come to be known as Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. Wheeler's paper has generated many subsequent quantum experiments, among them the one offered here. In Wheeler's 1978 experiment, "a single photon has two paths it could take in an interferometer. In its wave character, the photon will take both paths simultaneously. In its particle character, the photon needs to decide which of the two… Read More

1749. 1st Edition. Praga (Prague): Typis Universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae in Collegio Societatis Jesu ad S. Clementem, 1749. A scarce textbook of physics, mathematics, astronomy, the natural sciences. Etc.. OCLC lists only one copy--from Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague which is now named simply Charles University. This work was authored by Johann Gremner (1695-1757). Gremner joined the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit order) of St. Clemens in Prague in 1730 and authored several works. The volume offered here is volume three of: Philosophia Peripatetica In Tres Tractatus Distributa Quorum Primus Scientiam Rationalem Cum Ontologia, Tertius Physicam Particularem Continent, Cum Integra Notitia Philosophiæ Recentioris. Ad Usus Academicos Antiquissimae, Celeberrimae, Caesareae, Regiaeque Universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae Pragensis Accommodata. As with Tractus II, this volume, the others are quite scarce. CONDITION & DETAILS: Complete. 4to. 5 foldout copperplates. Woodcut initials, vignettes, and head… Read More

Paris, 1798. FIVE VOLUME FIRST EDITION SETOF LAPLACE'S FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON CELESTIAL MECHANICS & IN WHICH HE DEPICTS THE UNIVERSE AS A "GREAT SELF-REGULATING MACHINE" (Printing & the Mind of Man 252). First edition of one of the most important scientific works since Newton's "Principia." Five volumes bound as four - all first editions; all supplements present except the fifth. Includes folding plate in volume four. Laplace was the first to place astronomy on a modern mathematical footing, reformulating classical mechanics in terms of the calculus rather than the geometric constructions used by Newton. "Laplace's system of celestial mechanics (a term he coined) marked an advance over that of Newton, who had posited the necessity of a Deity in the universe to correct planetary irregularities; Laplace, on the other hand, when asked by Napoleon why his system contained no mention of the Creator, replied ‘I had no need of such a hypothesis'" (Norman, History of Science 1277). "Published over a… Read More

American Microscopical Society. 1st Edition. 138 ISSUES IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY, these published from 1950 to 1986 (volumes 69-105, missing only 6 issues with those noted below). The papers published in the Transactions cover every facet of microscopy as it relates to every field of science. The Transactions is published four times a year by the "The American Microscopical Society (AMS), a society of biologists dedicated to promoting the use of microscopy. A cohort of biologists and science educators, the AMS's members use a wide array of microscopical techniques (light microscopy, electron microscopy, fluorescence and confocal microscopes) to further their research and eventually publish their research in its journal Invertebrate Biology" (Wikipedia). January, April, July, & October Issues, Volume 69, 1950 (Complete); January, April, July, & October Issues, Volume 70, 1951 (Complete); January, April, July, & October Issues, Volume 71, 1952… Read More

New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Co, 1928. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF RALPH HARTLEY'S FOUNDATIONAL PAPER ON INFORMATION THEORY -- work that was "the single most important prerequisite" for Shannon's theory of information" (Wikipedia). Shannon acknowledged his debt to Hartley in the first paragraph of his landmark 1948 paper "A mathematical theory of communication," -- the paper in which Shannon introduced a qualitative and quantitative model of communication that solved the problem of reproducing at any given point a message originating at another point. Hartley had a way of thinking philosophically about the transmission of information, a habit that led to his unconventional method of formulating the problem of communication. Hartley "regarded the sender of a message as equipped with a set of symbols (the letters of the alphabet for instance) from which he mentally selects symbol after symbol, thus generating a sequence of symbols. He observed that a chance event, such as the rolling of… Read More