For the moment this post just logs my collection of books about the history of science, mostly through mx collection of old books on science.
(1726) Estampes p[our] les journaux des Sçavants depuis le mois de 7bre 1716 jusqu'au mois de Juin 1726
It is essentially a picture book of what counted as cutting-edge or noteworthy knowledge 300 years ago.
Rivard - La Gnomonique (1746)
This is La Gnomonique, ou l’art de faire des cadrans by Dominique-François Rivard (1697–1778). “Gnomonique” is gnomonics: the mathematical science of constructing sundials. Rivard explains how geometry, trigonometry and astronomical quantities such as latitude, the celestial pole, the Sun’s declination and hour angle, are converted into the lines drawn on an actual sundial.
What is means in practice is that Rivard is using the geometry of the heavens to determine a shadow on a fixed terrestrial surface.
This may look to be trivial, but if someone wants a sundial at a particular place, then it may be dial may therefore be vertical, declining, inclined, reclining, oriental or occidental. The geometry has to project the celestial coordinate system onto that specific plane in that specific place.
And Rivard doesn’t stop with Euclidean constructions on paper. He discusses the equipment used to establish orientations and transfer the geometrical construction to an actual surface.
In 1746 a sundial was not a garden ornament, it was a working time standard. Mechanical clocks were already widespread, of course, but they were imperfect timekeepers. Their rates drifted, and watches were considerably worse.
A sundial therefore provided a way of obtaining time directly from the Sun and could be used to check and regulate mechanical clocks and watches. The relationship was becoming particularly important as increasingly accurate clocks made the distinction between apparent solar time (what the sundial shows) and mean solar time (what a uniformly running clock should show) practically significant.
There is another easily missed point. Before 19th-century national time systems, time was fundamentally local. Solar noon occurred when the Sun crossed the local meridian. Paris noon and Lyon noon were therefore genuinely different times, longitude translated directly into a difference in local solar time. A properly constructed sundial was consequently also an instrument for establishing the time appropriate to a particular place.
That makes Rivard’s elaborate mathematics much easier to understand. He isn’t spending hundreds of pages solving geometrical puzzles merely so that a wealthy person can decorate a wall. A dial had to be calculated for its latitude and for the exact orientation of the surface. If the wall declined east or west, leaned, or faced an inconvenient direction, the hour lines had to be calculated accordingly. The plates in the book are engineering drawings for making functioning time-measuring instruments.
Thomin - Traite d'Optique Méchanique (1749)
Marc Mitouflet Thomin (c.1707–1752), was an ingénieur en optique working in Paris, so he actually made and sold optical instruments. In fact on the last few pages, Thomin gives details of the optical objects that he himself manufactured and sold, including spectacles, telescopes, mirrors, microscopes and magic lanterns.
Thomin was concerned with how optical instruments are actually constructed. That is the proportions and construction of telescopes (lunettes d’approche), simple and compound microscopes, spectacles, mirrors and other optical and perspective instruments. Particularly interestingly, it describes practical procedures for grinding and polishing lenses.
The second part of the book explains how spectacles should be selected and used for different sorts of eyesight and viewing distances.
We have to remember that Newton’s Opticks only appeared in 1704. So Thomin isn’t attempting another Newtonian theory of light, his is just showing what the practical optician could actually make from the increasingly sophisticated optical knowledge of the first half of the 18th century.
Also 1749 comes immediately before a major technological change in telescope making. John Dollond’s achromatic objective dates from the late 1750s. Thomin’s book therefore documents the practical craft of the telescope just before achromatic lenses transformed refracting instruments.
There is a card pasted onto the inner board bearing the name Georges Massiot and the address 15 Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire. Georges Massiot (1875–1962), with Radiguet & Massiot, was a Parisian manufacturer of precision optical and scientific instruments, e.g. microscopes, projection apparatus, optical equipment, electrical and physical instruments. The firm was created in 1899 when Arthur-Honoré Radiguet joined forces with his son-in-law Georges-Jules Massiot (1875–1962). The firm also acquired Molteni in 1899, a specialist in projection apparatus and glass slides whose origins went back to 1782.
Fontaine - Traité de Calcul Différentiel et Integral (1770)
Alexis Fontaine des Bertins (1704–1771) was a French mathematician. And the book is a collection of Fontaine’s mathematical memoirs.
Calculus was still comparatively young. Newton and Leibniz had created its foundations in the late 17th century, but 18th-century mathematicians were still discovering how to extend it and how to solve different classes of differential equations.
One of Fontaine’s important contributions was the development, independently alongside Euler and Clairaut, of what is now call an integrating factor. Which means multiplying a differential equation by a suitable function so that it becomes integrable.
Fontaine was working on problems involving quantities depending upon more than one variable at a time. Today a physicist would write
f(x,y,z)
and immediately distinguishes between differentiation with respect to x, y or z. But this description had to be invented.
Clairaut, writing to Euler in 1740, described Fontaine’s method and explained an expression equivalent to differentiating a quantity with respect to y while keeping x constant. The notation included the recognisable ratio
The historically significant part isn’t the letters dμ/dy themselves. Leibnizian derivative notation was already well established. The interesting step is Fontaine using this sort of notation in a developing multivariable calculus, where mathematicians had to distinguish which variable was changing and which were being held fixed.
Today we normally distinguish that by writing
Today, much of Fontaine’s work was soon superseded by Lagrange and Vandermonde.
Bossut - Traité Elementaire de Méchanique Statique (1772)
Charles Bossut (1730–1814) was a French mathematician and mathematical physicist, particularly active in mechanics, hydraulics and the education of engineers. At only 21, in 1752, he became professor of mathematics at the École royale du génie de Mézières, France’s leading military-engineering school. Monge succeeded Bossut in the mathematics chair in 1769.
Bossut starts with the general principles of equilibrium, then centre of gravity, before proceeding into practical mechanics: lever, balance, steelyard, pulleys, inclined plane, wheels, friction, forces and mechanical machines.
As an interesting aside, Bossut subsequently worked on the equilibrium of masonry vaults and applied his mechanics to checking the stability and required thickness of the supports of Soufflot’s church of Sainte-Geneviève, now called the Panthéon.
Horváth - Institutiones Matheseos, Philosophiae Auditorum Usibus Accommodatae (1782)
János/Johann Baptist Horváth (1732–1799) was a Hungarian Jesuit mathematician and physicist. At this time he was professor at the Royal University of Buda.
This is essentially the mathematical foundation expected of an 18th-century student preparing for higher work in philosophy and physics. It represents what mathematics was actually being taught.
Earlier editions appeared as two volumes, with the first dealing with arithmetic and algebra, and the second, geometry and conic sections. This 1782 Augsburg edition brings the material together into a single volume of 456 pages.
Horváth was Hungarian, and the Kingdom of Hungary was multilingual, with Hungarian, German, Slovak, Croatian and other languages being spoken. The book is in Latin, which was the official language of Hungarian public administration and higher education well into the 19th century. It avoided the politically and practically difficult question of choosing one vernacular over another.
And remember Newton’s Principia (1687) was in Latin, and Euler published much mathematical work in Latin. Linnaeus also used Latin, and university dissertations and scientific treatises were still frequently in Latin.
Hassenfratz - Cours de Physique Céleste (1803)
Jean-Henri Hassenfratz (1755–1827) was simultaneously scientist, teacher, engineer and revolutionary.
He supported the new chemistry of Lavoisier and participated in the intellectual circle responsible for reforming chemical nomenclature. Politically he was a committed revolutionary and Jacobin. During the Revolution he became involved in organising armaments for the Republic, and later had to flee Paris temporarily.
Then he became professor of mineralogy at the École des Mines and professor of general physics at the École Polytechnique. We will see later that Guenyveau eventually succeeded Hassenfratz as professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines.
Hassenfratz taught the physical system of the heavens, or how astronomical observations, geometry and Newtonian mechanics combined to explain the Solar System. Hassenfratz tries to take the new celestial mechanics and astronomical knowledge of the late 18th century and turn it into teaching material for the École Polytechnique. The book is based upon lectures given in 1801–1802, before publication in 1803.
This is an exceptionally interesting instant at which to publish a book describing the Solar System. Uranus had only been discovered by William Herschel in 1781, and there was Ceres in 1801, Pallas in 1802, Juno in 1804, and Vesta in 1807.
So when Hassenfratz was actually giving these lectures in 1801–02, when astronomers were discovering objects between Mars and Jupiter that they initially regarded as planets. His students were being taught celestial physics while the accepted inventory of the Solar System was changing every year.
There are 29 folding plates, and unusually three are printed/finished in colour. They are teaching diagrams, i.e. geometrical constructions, astronomical systems, planetary phenomena and related demonstrations.
Guenyveau - Essai sur la Science des Machines (1810)
André Guenyveau (1782–1861) was an ingénieur des mines, who later succeeded Jean-Henri Hassenfratz as professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines. He published this book when still a 28-year-old professional engineer working inside Napoleon’s increasingly organised technical state.
1810 is early industrial mechanics. Whilst the steam engine already existed, the mature science of thermodynamics did not. Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu was still 14 years away.
Guenyveau tried to construct a general mathematical science of machines, i.e. given a source of motive power, how can you calculate the useful mechanical effect that can actually be obtained from it?
The first part establishes the general theory of motive forces, their action, continuous motion communicated to machines, the effect produced by motors, the maximum possible effect, and methods of applying the theory to particular machines.
Guenyveau wants a theory capable of comparing the useful mechanical work obtained from quite different sources of power, e.g. water, steam, human, animal.
That may all sound obvious, but in 1810 it was when machines were ceasing to be treated merely as ingenious arrangements of wheels, levers and gears and became systems whose work and efficiency could be quantified.
It is interesting to note that Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, of the Coriolis effect, remarked that Guenyveau’s book was essential. This is significant because in his 1829 Du calcul de l’effet des machines Coriolis used the quantity force × distance and helped establish the terminology travail for mechanical work.
The second part of the book deals with water wheels, water-column engines, the hydraulic ram (bélier hydraulique), steam engines, and finally human and animal power.
The bookseller Brunot-Labbé, named on the Guenyveau title page, was not an ordinary bookseller. His shop on the Quai des Augustins became one of the principal Paris suppliers of mathematical and engineering works during the Napoleonic period.
Biot - Traité Élémentaire d'Astronomie Physique (1810)
Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) was a major French mathematical physicist, and was closely connected with the mathematical-physics world of Laplace. The complete second edition is three volumes, and volume III includes nautical astronomy.
The word élémentaire is misleading, because it doesn’t mean “astronomy for beginners” in the modern popular-science sense. Biot shows systematically how observations of angles, time and apparent positions are converted mathematically into knowledge of the physical solar system.
This is astronomy in the Newton–Laplace tradition, where Newtonian gravitation supplies the physical law, and an increasingly sophisticated mathematical analysis allows astronomers to calculate the motions. With precision instruments providing observations against which the calculations can be tested.
Volume I starts from observing the sky but moves into determining the meridian, Earth’s axis, terrestrial figure and flattening, atmospheric refraction, parallax and the use of precision astronomical instruments.
Volume II presents planetary and cometary theory and universal gravitation.
Volume III is a compendium, included Laplace’s method for determining cometary orbits, nautical astronomy by Rossel, measurement of heights using the barometer, the seconds pendulum at different latitudes, and a treatise on gnomonics by Armand Berroyer.
In 1820, with Félix Savart, Biot also established the quantitative relationship between an electric current and the magnetic field surrounding it, and this became the Biot–Savart law.
But in his early career (1803) Biot was sent by the Institut de France to thousands of stones that frll near L’Aigle in Normandy.
He interviewed witnesses, mapped where the stones had fallen, examined specimens and effectively treated the event as a geographical and physical investigation. His report became one of the decisive pieces of evidence establishing that meteorites really do fall from the sky.
Monge - Géométrie Descriptive (1827)
Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) is essentially the founder of descriptive geometry as a systematic discipline. And this is the fifth edition, published in 1827. Its stated in the title, this edition was “augmentée d’une théorie des ombres et de la perspective, extraite des papiers de l’auteur, par M. Brisson”. This was material on shadows and perspective taken from Monge’s papers after his death.
Monge asked the question, how to represent a three-dimensional object exactly on a two-dimensional sheet of paper, so that its dimensions, intersections and spatial relationships can be recovered geometrically?
Monge’s answer was the systematic use of orthogonal projections onto two mutually perpendicular planes, principally horizontal and vertical projections. Given the projections, it was possible to solve spatial problems geometrically. For example, find the intersection of surfaces, determine true lengths and angles, construct tangencies, develop curved surfaces, design vaults and stonework, and determine what portions of an object would be visible or illuminated.
Poisson - Traité de Mechanique (1833)
This is the second edition, and is a “considérablement augmentée” version of the first edition that appeared in 1811.
Poisson’s name is still everywhere in physics and mathematics. We have Poisson’s equation in electrostatics, with analogous forms in gravitation. We have the Poisson distribution in probability. We have the Poisson brackets {…}, which are fundamental to Hamiltonian mechanics and later acquire a profound connection with quantum mechanics. He worked in many areas, e.g. elasticity, fluids, electricity, magnetism, heat and celestial mechanics.
The two volumes divide mechanics into six books. Volume I looks at statics and dynamics, and Volume II continues dynamics and then treats hydrostatics and hydrodynamics.
Poisson reduces mechanical problems to forces, coordinates, differential equations, constraints, moments of inertia and equations of motion. So his focus is on equations that describe the equilibrium and motion of mechanical systems.
Both Biot (1774–1862) and Poisson (1781–1840) belonged to the French mathematical-physics establishment that developed after the Revolution, with Laplace, Lagrange and the École Polytechnique.
Thomson & Tait - Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1879)
The authors are William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin, and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901), professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh.
William Thomson, as Kelvin gave us the absolute temperature and the kelvin scale, and contributed to thermodynamics, mathematical physics, electricity and magnetism, submarine telegraphy and fundamental work on energy.
P. G. Tait was a mathematical physicist, who worked in quaternions, thermodynamics and kinetic theory.
We must remember that in 1879 natural philosophy meant investigating the laws of the material world and the deductions that could be drawn from those laws. To all intents and purposes, this meant physics.
The original Treatise on Natural Philosophy appeared in 1867. Thomson and Tait intended to write a 4-volume comprehensive treatment of physical science in several volumes. In fact, only Volume I (in two parts) was ever completed (Part II appeared in 1883).
T&T (a recognised abbreviation) moved from the French tradition of analytical mechanics to the Victorian formulation of mathematical physics around energy, work, dynamics and thermodynamics.
One way of looking at the objectives of T&T was to move from Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to rebuilding mechanics and physical science around a small number of fundamental principles. The most important being, energy. Mechanics, heat, electricity and other physical phenomena were increasingly being understood not as isolated sciences but as different manifestations governed by common quantitative principles.
Pawsey (ed) - The Practical Electrician’s Pocket Book (1942)
it was a long-running annual pocket book, that was first introduced around 1899. This issue was edited by Owen Pawsey, and published in London by Electrical Trading.
It is home to the usual installation guides, but this particular year it introduced two new chapters. First on Motor Installation and Maintenance. The reason given was that maintenance and repair were taking an “increasingly big part” in the work of the practical electrician. And second, on Electrical Bomb Detectors, with a serious six-page technical treatment of incendiary-bomb detection for civil defence.
These aren’t bomb detectors in the modern sense of devices for finding unexploded bombs. They are automatic systems for detecting an incendiary bomb after it has entered or ignited in a building, allowing fewer human fire-watchers to supervise factories and commercial premises. The heat detectors could respond either to a rapid temperature rise, to reaching a predetermined temperature, or by melting an alloy to make or break a circuit. The recommended operating temperature was is 135°F (about 57°C).
There was also a description of a roof space crossed by thin conductor wires. An incendiary bomb, or debris produced by it, falls through a wire and breaks it. Breaking the closed electrical circuit operates a relay and sounds the alarm.
And this was specified quantitatively. The conductor spans were not to exceed 15 ft, adjacent spans were no more than 4 inches apart, and the wire had to satisfy specified mechanical tests. The book even recommends hard-drawn copper wire of 28–32 SWG.
In other words, this is essentially an electrically supervised trip-wire grid across the roof space, except that the thing doing the tripping is an incendiary bomb.
The system could use DC mains, with current restricted to 3 mA. With AC, the exposed conductors were supplied through a 12 V or 25 V double-wound transformer, with one pole or the centre point earthed. The recommended relays were Post Office 3,000-type relays. So making use of components and engineering practice developed for Britain’s telephone network.
The third system was more sophisticated. The book explicitly distinguished photo-conductive cells, photo-emissive and photo-voltaic cells. The idea was that the detector would see the light produced by the burning incendiary bomb.
The detector had a specified “limiting distance”, it had to resist false operation from vibration, transient voltage fluctuations, temperature and humidity, the alarm had an independent battery supply, and they had to give an alarm if the electrical supply, valve or circuit fails.
