New York: Institute of Radio Engineers, 1961. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPPERS OF MINSKY’S “SEMINAL” WORK ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (MIT Biography). In this paper, Minsky outlines the basic features of AI programs that today still form the basis of artificial solving, including searching and pattern-recognition techniques. This..... More
Berlin: Julius Springer. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS OF THREE LANDMARK PAPERS THAT TOGETHER FORMED THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS. "In spite of its high-sounding name and its successful solutions of numerous problems in atomic physics, quantum theory, and especially the quantum theory of polyelectronic systems, prior to 1925, was..... More
Berlin: Julius Springer, 1924. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST AMPLIFIED GEIGER COUNTER and the first use of vacuum tube triodes to amplify weak signals. Pierre and Marie Curie, as well as Rutherford, used an ionization chamber in their studies of radioactivity. The current that was produced by a...... More
Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF JAMES RAINWATER’S INFLUENTIAL, NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER ON THE ASYMMETRICAL SHAPES OF CERTAIN ATOMIC NUCLEI. In 1975 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and James Rainwater for "The discovery of..... More
Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF THE TWO PAPERS IN WHICH MARCIA MAYER DEVELOPS A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR THE STRUCTURE OF NUCLEAR SHELLS. Mayer “was the first person to investigate the theoretical basis of nuclear pairing,” something which plays a critical role in the..... More
London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1st Edition. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR, A FOLIO 1st EDITION of "the first great star-atlas of the southern hemisphere' (Norman Catalogue 1056). "With this monumental survey of the stars of the southern hemisphere, Herschel completed the task begun by his father William, who fifty years..... More
Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1952. 1st Edition. FULL VOLUME, BOUND FIRST EDITION of David Bohm's deterministic 'Hidden Variables Approach to Quantum Theory.' Bohm's 'Hidden Variables' interpretation is the basis of the De Broglie-Bohm Theory (or Bohmian Mechanics) and extends the Pilot Wave Theory to cover multiple particles. Bohm published an..... More
Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1970. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A PAPER BY BALLENTINE WHICH WOULD BECOME THE BASIS FOR THE STATISTICAL OR ENSEMBLE INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS, A THEORY EINSTEIN HAD EARLIER “INSISTED WAS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE INTERPRETATION OF THE QUANTUM THEORY” (Reed, Deltete, Foundations of..... More
1945. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF HADAMARD’S EXPLORATION OF HOW MATHEMATICIANS INVENT NEW IDEAS ALONGSIDE A STUDY OF THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS. Among the important documents collected is a letter from Albert Einstein analyzing his own mechanism of thought. This work appears in Weil’s list of Einstein’s publications (#214)..... More
1910. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST PRINTED H-R DIAGRAM, probably the most important diagram in stellar astrophysics” (Evans, The Curious Astronomer, 2014). In the volume offered, the German physicist Hans Rosenberg published “The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (or H–R diagram) -- a scatter diagram showing the relationship between the “intrinsic..... 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..... More
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1876. 1st Edition. In 1876 and working independently of Maxwell, Vyshnegradsky “developed stability criteria of steam engine governors” (Engineering Department University of Illinois). His work explained “the conditions of stability [and criteria] of a steam engine equipped with a direct-action centrifugal regulator” (DSB, XIV, 105-106). As well, Vyshnegradsky’s..... More
1st Edition. TWO IMPORTANT OFFPRINTS ON MARS bound in a volume, a Sammmelband from the library of Charles Darwin’s son, George Darwin. Darwin bound together 11 other offprints and pamphlets, all related to astronomy and mathematics. The most important offprint is by Schiaparelli; in it, he famously refers not to..... More
1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF ASAPH HALL’S DISCOVERY OF THE MOONS OF MARS. Three papers are included in this listing; the 2nd and 3rd are first editions as well. The first and most important is Hall’s 1877 discovery of two moons orbiting Mars. The second, by Madan, proposes names for..... More
New York: American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1956. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF AN EARLY PAPER ON THE IBM 7030, ALSO KNOWN AS STRETCH, WAS IBM'S FIRST TRANSISTORIZED SUPERCOMPUTER. In 1958, two years after the publication of this paper, "Design Objectives for the IBM Stretch Computer,” Dunwell “became..... 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..... More
London: Williams and Norgate, 1880. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE JOINT FIRST PUBLICATION OF VENN DIAGRAMS (see below for clarification of concurrent publication). Venn diagrams provide an easy and better way of visualizing elements, information, sets, concepts, logical relationships, and even simply ideas. Essentially, they are illustrations that utilize..... More
Paris: Theophile Barrois, 1780. 1st French Edition. First French edition published a year after the original and translated by the author. LANDMARK WORK MARKING THE DISCOVERY OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS by JAN INGEN-HOUSZ. In 1772, a paper by Joseph Priestley’s presented a wealth of achievements, but “the most surprising of... was the..... More
Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1889. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF BOLLEE’S PAPER DETAILING THE CALCULATING MACHINE WHICH EMBODIED A MULTIPLICATION TABLE. The Bollee machine “could be considered the direct ancestor of the Millionaire”... “the first commercially successful mechanical calculator that could perform a direct multiplication” (Wikipedia). “Most early calculating machines carried out..... More
Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1855. 1st Edition. Full volume. RARE FIRST PRINTING OF BABBAGE’S REPORT ON SCHEUTZ’S DIFFERENCE CALCULATOR. Babbage thought so highly of Scheutz’s engine that in an effort to promote [it], presented a talk on it before the Academie des Sciences. In the talk, Babbage describes the machine’s construction and..... More
London: Royal Society, 1938. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST CORRECT “SOLUTION TO THE MANY-BODY PROBLEM IN CELESTIAL MECHANICS UNDER EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF GRAVITY FOR THE SPECIAL CASE OF POINT MASSES” (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). Eddington and Clark’s equations “are now frequently used for high precision tracking..... More
Berlin: Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1911. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF ONE OF A SERIES OF PAPERS BY PLANCK INTRODUCING THE CONCEPT OF ZERO POINT ENERGY. “The concept of zero-point energy has its roots in a reformulation of the original version of quantum theory proposed by Max..... More
Philadelphia: Franklin Institute, 1926. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION DODD’S 1926 CORRELATION COEFFICIENT CALCULATOR. The paper is accompanied by three illustrations and a photograph of his correlation machine. Stuart Dodd, a researcher at Princeton University, built a machine to automatically calculate correlations – a correlation calculator. Correlation is a statistical concept..... More
Berlin: Julius Springer, 1921. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE “FIRST QUANTUM INTERPRETATION OF OPTICAL DISPERSION” (Taltavull, Rudolf Ladenburg and the First Quantum Interpretation of Optical Dispersion, Eur. Phys. J. H. 45, 123, 2020). “The problem of optical dispersion taught physicists important lessons about how to cross the boundary between..... More
London: Macmillan Co., 1997. 1st Edition. Full volume. 1st EDITION WITH ORIGINAL FRONT WRAP PRESENT OF THE LANDMARK CLONING OF THE FIRST MAMMAL, DOLLY. NO ADDRESS LABEL. British biologists Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell announced the cloning of Dolly in this paper, the first account of their efforts and..... More