Guericke, Otto von

Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica De Vacuo Spatio. Amsterdam, Jan Jansson à Waesberge, 1672



Folio. Engraved title, portrait of author, 2 folding plates, 20 text engravings; title restored at lower outer corner not affecting image. Contemporary calf; rebacked with original spine laid down, some cracking and scuffing of surface, corners renewed.

Peter Neukrantz (ownership inscription on title-page) --  J. M. Reinesius (ownership inscription on title-page) -- Heirs of Sprengel -- Bibliotheca Academica (gift inscription of the former) -- Herbert M. Evans (bookplate) --  University of Chicago (deaccession stamp)

Dibner, Heralds, 55; Dibner, 10 Founding Fathers of Electrical Science, pp. 13-14; Horblit 44; Norman 952; Sparrow, p. 16.

First edition of one of the great classics of science, in which Guericke describes the electrical machine by which he generated the first visible and audible electric discharges. The book is also important for its account of the author's famous air pump with which he created a vacuum for the first time. His discovery of the elasticity of air was one result of these experiments, leading to the investigation of the decrease of air density with height, and the variations in air pressure corresponding to changes in weather, thereby making possible barometric weather forecasts.

Illustrated here on one of the double plates is the famous Magdeburg experiment of 1657 in which two teams of eight horses tried unsuccessfully to pull apart two copper hemispheres from which the air had been removed. Guericke also sought to prove the magnetism of the earth and other bodies by experimenting with a sphere made of sulphur, which he demonstrated to have the power of attraction and the ability to move bodies. By rubbing the sphere and rotating it he was able to generate audible and visible sparks through static electricity.

The latter part of this work contains Guericke's astronomical investigations on comets and fixed stars and the planetary system in general, all from a Copernican viewpoint.