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AN EXCEPTIONAL COLLECTION OF 69 ORIGINAL WORKS ASSEMBLED FOR PRESENTATION TO HIS SON. An extraordinary collection of works by Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), the outstanding astronomer and physical scientist of his day, assembled for presentation to his son William James Herschel (not to be confused with John s father, the astronomer Frederick William). The collection includes offprints of Herschel s three most important publications on photography, the first two of which have corrections and annotations in his hand. These offprints are of extreme rarity ABPC/RBH list no other copy of any of them in the past 75 years. Herschel s intensive investigations in photography and photochemistry during the late 1830s and early 1840s led to enormous advances: he coined the terms positive and negative, invented new photographic processes and improved existing ones, and experimented with colour reproduction. Among the mathematical works are several on the calculus of operators , as well as Herschel s corrected galley proofs of a very important article on the theory of probability which was read by James Clerk Maxwell and led him to introduce probabilistic methods into the theory of gases, and thereby lay the foundations of statistical physics. There is also an offprint of a little studied paper in which Herschel describes a mechanical calculating machine, developed "In the course of a conversation with Mr. Babbage on the subject of applying machinery to the performance of numerical computations". The astronomy papers include an offprint of Herschel s great catalogue of 380 double stars (i.e., binary stars). All of the offprints are rare, with most either not listed on OCLC, or listed in only a handful of copies. "Herschel s university years at St. John s College, Cambridge, were devoted primarily to mathematics. Not only did he carry away the top academic prizes during this time, he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and co-founded the Analytical Society with Charles Babbage and George Peacock … Even at this early stage of his career, Herschel s zeal to "leave the world wiser than [he] found it", was already fully formed, and this clearly motivated his approach to photography when that too appeared on his horizon. His brief forays into legal studies and then into an academic career at Cambridge, ended abruptly at the close of 1816 when he settled finally on learning the trade of astronomer as his father s assistant. Herschel s life as a scientist of independent means, at a time when such a profession hardly existed, allowed him the freedom to pursue his personal interests, among them the study of light" (Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, p. 653). Provenance: William James Herschel (inscription in John Herschel s hand on front free endpaper of Vol. III: W. J. Herschel // From his affectionate father // JFWH ); Dr. Sydney Ross, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (small red book label on each front paste-down). W. J. Herschel (1833-1917), the eldest son of John Herschel, is credited with being the first European to note the value of fingerprints for identification. Sydney Ross (1915-2013), leading chemist and bibliophile, was a former Professor of Colloid Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, and founder, and until his death, president of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. In 2001 he published a 590-page annotated Catalogue of the Herschel Library of William and John Herschel. In the following description of the works in these volumes, the numbers refer to the list of contents below. Photography (43, 44-47, 51, 59) "Photography was announced at the very height of Herschel s career. He had just returned from four years in South Africa, having completed an examination of the skies of the Southern Hemisphere, and had reluctantly been raised to a baronetcy. Herschel learned of the announcement of the Daguerreotype on 22 January [1839], and of Talbot s competing process within the s. Seller Inventory # 4321
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