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ONE OF THE FIRST TRANSLATIONS OF à RSTED'S FAMOUS AND UNOBTAINABLE LATIN PAMPHLET ON THE DISCOVERY OF ELECTROMAGNETISM, PUBLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING MONTH IN FRANCE, AND IMPORTANT FOR ITS CONNECTION TO AMPà RE'S EXTENSIONS OF à RSTED'S RESEARCH ON ELECTROMAGNETIC PHENOMENA. A MAGNIFICENT COPY IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS. In July of 1820 the Danish scientist Hans Christian à rsted announced his discovery that a magnetized needle could be deflected by an electric current. The discovery created a sensation among European savants, and shortly thereafter Ampà re extended à rsted's work by showing, among other things, that parallel current-carrying wires repelled or attracted one another, depending upon the whether the two currents were in the same or opposite directions. A little over a decade later, Faraday showed that moving magnets could induce an electrical current in nearby conducting wires, and by 1865 Maxwell had developed a complete quantitative theory of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. It was à rsted's discovery that provided the first hint of such a relationship - a relationship that both stimulated the development of Einstein's special theory of relativity and is now understood as a necessary consequence of that theory. As Nobel Prize winner Edward M. Purcell observed, "Whether the ideas of special relativity could have evolved in the absence of a complete theory of the electromagnetic field is a question for the historian of scientist to speculate about; probably it can't be answered. We can only say that the actual history shows rather plainly a path running from à rsted's compass needle to Einstein's postulates." Edward M. Purcell and David J. Morin, "Electricity and Magnetism", 3d edition (Cambridge Univ. Pr. 2013). à rsted's discoveries were first described sometime between July 10 and 14, 1820, in a little-read Danish literary and intellectual journal, Danske Litteratur-Tidende; and were subsequently described in more detail in a Latin pamphlet dated July 21, 1820, with the title Experimenta circa effectum conflictus electrici in acun magneticam, which was privately distributed to a carefully selected set of leaders of the European scientific community. The Latin pamphlet is now a famously unobtainable rarity. However, shortly after it was issued it was translated into the principal languages of western Europe and as a result became known to a wider audience. Bern Dibner describes these translations as "almost simultaneous" (B. Dibner, "Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism" (1961)), and we have been unable to establish any priority between them - except that the English version in the Annals of Philosophy, not published until October, appears to have been the laggard. (Facsimiles of these translations of Experimenta circa effectum ., including one into Danish, are provided in Absalon Larsen, "La Dà couverte de L'à lectromagnà tisme Faite en 1820 par J.-C. Oersted", published in 1920 to commemorate the centennial of the discovery.) However, the French translation offered here was certainly among the first, and moreover is important because France was the location of the earliest most important extensions of à rsted's work, by Ampà re. à rsted's paper describes his experiments on what he described in the original Latin version as "Electricitate, Galvanismo et Magnetismo" - electricity, galvanism, and magnetism. At the time, "[e]lectricity meant electrostatics; galvanism referred to the effects produced by continuous currents from batteries, a subject opened up by Galvani's chance discovery and the subsequent experiments of Volta; [and] magnetism dealt with the already ancient lore of lodestones, compass needles, and the terrestrial magnetic field. It seemed clear to some that there must be a relation between galvanic currents and electric charge, although there was little more direct evidence than the fact that both could cause shocks. On the other hand, magnetism and electricity appeared to have.
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