Beschreibung:

AMPRE, Andr Marie (1775-1836). Mmoires sur l'action mutuelle de deux courans lectriques, sur celle qui existe entre un courant lectrique et un aimant ou le globe terrestre, et celle de deux aimans l'un sur l'autre . Reprinted from the Annales de chimie et de physique 15 [1820]. [Paris, after 6 November 1820]. 8 o (202 x 122 mm). Half-title (as above), Premier mmoire only. Collation: 1 8 2-4 8 5 2 . 34 leaves, pp. [1]-68. 5 fold-out plates, by Adam after Girard. (Some foxing to plates, minor crease to plate 3.) Contemporary boards, edges red-stained (later paper labels on spine, backstrip and extremities rubbed with some paper loss.) Provenance : Jean-Jacques Schaub (1773-1825), Swiss mathematician (ex dono inscription on front pastedown: "Don de l'Auteur Jean Jaques Schaub professeur"). PRESENTATION COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION, FIRST OFFPRINT ISSUE, OF THE FIRST PAPER ON THE NATURE OF ELECTRIC CURRENT BY THE FOUNDER OF ELECTRODYNAMICS. Like Hans Christian Oersted, Ampre was a devoted follower of Kant who edified his own Kantian philosophical system. Ampre's philosophy postulated "two levels of knowledge of the external world ... phenomena, presented to us directly through the senses, and ... noumena, the objective causes of phenomena" (DSB); this determined the form of his scientific discoveries, of which the most important were his discoveries in electrodynamics, beginning in the fall of 1820. Fascinated by Oersted's demonstration of the existence of electromagnetism, which had been reported by Franois Arago to an astonished Acadmie des Sciences on September 4, 1820, Ampre immediately set out to determine through his own experiments the exact relationship of electrical current-flow and magnetism. He read his first report to the Acadmie des Sciences on September 18, 1820, and gave further reports on September 25, October 9, November 6, and in later sessions. In the present paper, his "first great memoir on electrodynamics" (DSB), probably written soon after November 6, the latest session of the Acadmie that is mentioned, Ampre describes the series of "classical and simple" experiments with which he first explored the interaction of two electric currents and of electric currents with magnets as well as with the earth's magnetic field. Ampre here "demonstrated for the first time that two parallel conductors, carrying currents traveling in the same direction, attract each other; conversely, if the currents are traveling in opposite directions, they repel each other" (Sparrow, p. 33). His experiments provided empirical evidence for his new theory of magnetism as "electricity in motion". The memoir concludes with nine succinct statements of the nature of electric current that sum up his early work (quoted in full in DSB). Over the next seven years Ampre pursued his research in electrodynamics. The bibliography of Ampre's writings is extremely complex and remains to be studied: he published "his researches in a bewildering array of journal articles, offprints, and revisions of earlier works... it often happened that he would publish a paper in a journal one week (usually the Annales de chimie et de physique ), only to find the next week that he had thought of several new ideas that he felt ought to be incorporated into the paper. Since he could not change the original, he would add the revisions to the separately published reprints of the paper and even modify the revised versions later if he felt it necessary: some 'reprints' of Ampre's articles exist in as many as five different versions. The present work, revised considerably from its first appearance in the Annales de chimie et de physique , is an example of this process" (Norman). From 1821 through 1823 Ampre apparently published several collections of his memoirs on electrodynamics under the same general title Mmoires sur l'action mutuelle de deux courans lectriques , but with varying contents (see following lots). IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY. Jean-Jacques Schaub was the auth