Lot n° 242
Sélection Bibliorare

GUERICKE (Otto von). - Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio. Amsterdam, Johannes Janssonius Van Waesberge, 1672.

Estimation : 10000 / 12000
Adjudication : Invendu
Description
Petit in-folio, vélin rigide, dos lisse orné, pièce de titre rouge, tranches lisses (A. Casares).

► Édition originale de cet ouvrage de première importance pour la physique du vide, composé par l'inventeur du tout premier appareil à vide, la pompe à air.

L'ouvrage est illustré d’un frontispice, d'un portrait de l’auteur hors texte, de deux planches hors texte repliées et de vingt figures dans le texte, dont sept à pleine page (la fig. XVIII est répétée), le tout finement gravé sur cuivre.

« Guericke’s invention of the air pump grew out of his interest in the nature of space, particularly in Descartes's belief in the equivalence of space and matter and denial of the possibility of vacuum.

Guericke suspected otherwise, and, after several false starts, managed to construct a hollow apparatus from which he evacuated the air with a suction pump, thus disproving Descartes’s claims and resolving the old controversy between the vacuists and plenists.

His discovery of the elasticity of air was the most important result of Guericke’s experiments, as it led him to investigate the decrease of air density with height, to study the variations in air pressure corresponding to changes in weather (from which he was able to make barometric weather forecasts) and to experiment further with the phenomena connected with vacuums, especially the work capacity of air.

→ The famous Magdeburg experiment of 1657, in which two eight-horse teams tried unsuccessfully to pull apart two copper hemispheres from which the air had been exhausted, is illustrated in the folding plate between pages 104 and 105 » (Norman).

♦ De la bibliothèque du chimiste et médecin Pedro Narciso Arata (1849-1922), avec ex-libris.

Mouillure habilement restaurée dans la marge extérieure, portrait dérelié, quelques rousseurs, brunissure aux deux derniers feuillets.

Dibner : Heralds of Science, n°55 – Norman, n°952 – Wheeler Gift, n°170 – Horblit, n°44 – Sparrow : Milestones of Science, 16.
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