London: William Wesley & Son, 1894. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION. EXCEPTIONALLY SCARCE. In the late 19th century, George Cornish Sutton Higgs, a British watchmaker and optician proficient in the sciences, built an extraordinary spectrograph and employed it to greatly advance the application of photography to the study of solar spectra..... More

1843. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE DISCOVERY AND DEMONSTRATION OF THE EQUIVALENCE OF HEAT AND ENERGY; all three parts of this paper are present in this volume. In this 1843 paper, a greatly expanded version of a presentation he gave before the British Association earlier in that year, Joule..... More

1861. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION and appearance in French of an 1861 landmark paper marking "the invention of Spectral Analysis and the announcement of the discovery of two new elements, Cesium and Rubidium [and eventually many more] by using the new method of spectroscopy developed by Kirchhoff and Bunsen. The..... More

Paris: De l’Imprimerie Royale, 1778. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, LAVOISIER’S OFFICIAL EASTER MEMOIR ON THE COMPOSITION OF AIR. In this work, Lavoisier proposed that ordinary air is composed of two different gases, one “highly respirable” (that he named “oxygen”) and the other (later named nitrogen) that was unable to support..... More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars. 1st Edition. FOUR FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF LIPPMANN’S MILESTONE SERIES OF PAPERS DESCRIBING HIS NOBEL PRIZE WINNING INVENTION OF “A METHOD OF REPRODUCING COLORS PHOTOGRAPHICALLY BASED ON THE PHENOMENON OF INTERFERENCE” Nobel Prize Committee). Lippmann’s prize represents the only time this prestigious award has been given..... More

London: Taylor and Sons. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF JOSEPH LOCKYER'S DISCOVERY OF HELIUM. Handsomely bound extract. This was the first chemical element discovered on an extraterrestrial body before being found on the Earth. Though rare on the Earth, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, comprising..... More

London: Taylor and Francis, 1891. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS OF A NUMBER OF SIGNIFICANT PAPERS: PART I OF MICHELSON’S 1891 PAPER ON HIS NEWLY INVENTED INVESTIGATIVE TOOL, THE INTERFEROMETER also MICHELSON’S PAPER ON INTERFERENCE TECHNIQUES RELATED TO ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS BEYOND THE RESOLUTION OF LARGE TELESCOPES also LORD RAYLEIGH’S IMPORTANT PAPER..... More

London: Taylor and Francis, 1859. 1st Edition. First edition, disbound, near fine extract of “the first full and reliable account of the state of vision in red-green blindness” (Report of the Annual Meeting, Volume 62, p. 735). Today Pole’s work is considered to exhibit “highly ingenious reason”; at the time..... More

1896. 1st Edition. John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919), was an English theoretical and experimental physicist who “made seminal contributions to theoretically defining the resolving power of gratings, prisms, telescopes and microscopes” (Lord Rayleigh: A Scientific Life, The Optical Society, June 2009). He was also head of the Royal..... More

Leipzig: Barth-Verlag, 1898. 1st Edition. IN RARE ORIGINAL WRAPS, THE 1898 FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF RONTGEN’S ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE X-RAY, INCLUSIVE OF ALL 3 PAPERS and housed in a custom cloth box. For this work, Rontgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. “Their..... More

London: Taylor and Francis, 1864. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION EXTRACT OF ONE OF A GROUNDBREAKING SERIES OF PAPERS (OR ‘MEMOIRS’) JOHN TYNDALL WROTE AS HE INVESTIGATED THE ABSORPTION OF RADIANT ENERGY BY GASES. In these papers, Tyndall demonstrates the first quantification and demonstration that atmospheric gases are infrared emitters, in..... More

London: Macmillan, 1897. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FULL VOLUME, OF THE 1st ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT AND INFLUENTIAL DISCOVERIES OF THE LATE 19th CENTURY, the Noble Prize winning discovery and announcement of the Zeeman effect: the splitting of a spectral line into complicated multiple patterns when..... More