Animadversions First Part Machina Coelestis by Hooke Robert (3 results)

No Binding. Condition: Poor. 1st Edition. [viii]+78+[2 blank] pages with three folding 3ngraved plates. Quarto (9 1/4" x 7") stab sewn and untrimmed throughout, with deckle edges, mostly unopened housed in custom clamshell box. (Wing H-2611; ESTC R38964) First edition. Hooke counted devices [described in the present volume] among his greatest mechanical achievements. [.] What distinguished Hooke's instruments, indeed, was the fact that they were 'convenient and manageable,' together with the real advances they made. [.] The most spectacular of Hooke's complex scientific instruments, his equatorial quadrant, is described in detail -- with a glorious illustration -- in his Animadversions (the book in which he publicly attacked Hevelius's rejection of instrumental aids for astronomy.) [.] An equatorial quadrant allows the observer to follow the motion of a heavenly body by pushing his instrument around the axis: 'but Hooke goes further and has a machine do the pushing.'" (Quoted from Lisa Jardine's The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, London: Harper Collins, 2003, page 44ff.) Robert Hooke was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to become one of the most important scientists of his time. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction. Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]". (Wikipedia) Condition: Final 2 leaves with large sections of loss due to damage (photo facsimile pages provided of these leaves), Edge wear some chipping and loss else a poor but rare item.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. First edition, very rare, of "Hooke's most confident and outspoken treatise on instrumentation, 'Animadversions', which derived from a lecture delivered at Gresham College on 11 December 1673 and was published the following year. 'Animadversions' started with a sustained and convincing exposure of the inadequacy of Hevelius's astronomical instruments. Hooke pointed out that on the arc of a brass quadrant or sextant with a six-foot radius, a minute measured only a fiftieth of an inch, and a second a three-thousandth of an inch, which no man living could distinguish with his naked eye Plainly, he argued, instruments could not be more accurate than their least accurate component, and all the care that Hevelius had devoted to marking the divisions on his instruments, refining his plumb lines, improving his sights and increasing the scale and rigidity of his quadrants counted for little, since the power of distinguishing by the naked eye is that which bounds and limits all the other niceness [precision] . In short, Hevelius's instruments were no more accurate than those used by Tycho Brahe almost a hundred years earlier, and all his achievements were undermined by his use of plain sights. Nothing that Hevelius had written could explain his strange resistance to telescopic sights, whose value Hooke had painstakingly explained to him in the 1660s" (Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much (2002), p. 180). As if to emphasize how outdated Hevelius instruments were, Hooke here describes one of his most remarkable inventions, his equatorial quadrant. "Hooke brilliantly exploited the unrivalled breadth of his mechanical and scientific experience, his much-criticized versatility, to devise an instrument that none of his contemporaries could have produced, and which anticipated features that would not become standard for 150 years. His equatorial quadrant brought together his work on conical pendulums and clockwork, his knowledge of spirit levels, his refinement of micrometer screws and eyepieces, his experience of telescopic sights and his invention of the reflecting quadrant, and combined these with two new and valuable mechanical devices for the transmission of rotary motion, the universal joint (or 'Hooke Joint') and the worm-wheel . . . He described a large iron quadrant, with a radius of about five feet, in which accuracy was achieved not only by telescopic sights and cross-thread micrometer eyepieces but by the clever use of a screw adjustment on the movable limb of the quadrant. Hooke had first described this perpetual screw device, which is still used in marine sextants, in a Royal Society meeting in March 1666. It could be used as a dividing engine, to mark the divisions of a quadrant with much greater precision than existing geometrical techniques. In explaining how a circle could be divided mechanically, using gearwheels instead of geometry and approximation, Hooke anticipated Jesse Ramsden's work on dividing engines and other machine tools in the 1770s" (Inwood, pp. 182-4). The universal joint found numerous later applications, including by Henry Ford in the drive shafts of automobiles. Rare Book Hub lists only one copy in the last 45 years, which realised £5,002 at Bloomsbury in 2013. 4to, pp. [viii], 78 with three folding engraved plates (lightly browned with a few early marginal annotations, ink smudge to lower blank margin of one page). Panelled calf in the style of the period.

LeatherBound. Condition: New. BOOKS ARE EXEMPT FROM IMPORT DUTIES AND TARIFFS; NO EXTRA CHARGES APPLY. LeatherBound edition. Condition: New. Reprinted from 1674 edition. Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden leaf printing on spine. Bound in genuine leather with Satin ribbon page markers and Spine with raised gilt bands. A perfect gift for your loved ones. Pages: 93 NO changes have been made to the original text. This is NOT a retyped or an ocr'd reprint. Illustrations, Index, if any, are included in black and white. Each page is checked manually before printing. As this print on demand book is reprinted from a very old book, there could be some missing or flawed pages, but we always try to make the book as complete as possible. Fold-outs, if any, are not part of the book. If the original book was published in multiple volumes then this reprint is of only one volume, not the whole set. Sewing binding for longer life, where the book block is actually sewn (smythe sewn/section sewn) with thread before binding which results in a more durable type of binding. Pages: 93.