Watt james beddoes thomas (6 Ergebnisse)

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First edition. From the Library of James Watt. First edition, the rare offprint in which Hutton's theory of the earth first circulated in his own words, and James Watt's copy, bound for the Watts with four further tracts of the Huttonian controversy under the label Tracts Geological, 1785 to 1805. The paper, read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 7 March and 4 April 1785, found in the rocks no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end. It made the surface of the earth the product of forces still at work, acting through a span of time beyond human reckoning. Hutton sent the separately issued paper to his friends before the first volume of the Society's Transactions appeared in 1788; this is the form in which the theory was first read outside Edinburgh. The four tracts bound with it, in the order the Watts chose, the memoir first and the theory second, begin with the account of Hutton's life that Playfair read to the Society in 1803. Then follow Gregory Watt's paper on the slow cooling of melted basalt (1804) and Hall's account of the compression experiments that put Hutton's subterranean heat to the test (1805). The last is Beddoes's paper on the kinship of basalt and granite (1791), an author's presentation copy to the Manchester radical Thomas Cooper. Between them the five tracts hold the theory, an early defence of it by another hand, its two experimental vindications, and the life of its author. They were gathered within twenty years of the first reading by the one household that stood in both of the theory's worlds, the Edinburgh of Black, Playfair and Hall and the Birmingham of Boulton, Wedgwood, Beddoes and Davy. Provenance: James Watt (1736-1819), for whose household the five tracts were bound after 1805 under the spine label Tracts Geological, 1785 to 1805; his son James Watt junior (1769-1848), who preserved his father's library and papers and whose own friendships account for the fifth tract; the Gibson-Watts, to whom the volume descended in the family, with whose library it was moved from Heathfield to Doldowlod in the 1870s; Geoffrey Walton (1939-2025), mining geologist and historian of geology, with his pictorial bookplate on the front pastedown. The elder Watt had come to know Hutton through Joseph Black, and the two were friends from the 1770s, their surviving letters, seven from Hutton and four from Watt, running from 1774 to 1795. It was probably through Watt that Hutton was introduced, on his tour of England and Wales in 1774, to the Birmingham circle that would be called the Lunar Society, and he afterwards corresponded with Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin; the traffic in ideas ran both ways, and David Philip Miller has suggested that Hutton's picture of the earth as a heat engine, wearing itself down and building itself up again, owed something to what he saw of Watt's engines. Watt's copies reached Birmingham in the summer of 1787. The earliest firm evidence of the offprint in anyone's hands is a pair of letters that Dennis Dean brought to notice: on 25 August 1787 Josiah Wedgwood wrote to Watt that his son would shortly deliver two copies of the Theory of the Earth, one for Watt and one for Boulton, which Hutton had sent south with the younger Wedgwood, and within the week Black wrote to Princess Dashkova at St Petersburg to set out Hutton's new theory at length, ending that the paper Hutton had published was but a specimen and that he was preparing a larger work. Watt's library also held Hutton's 1785 Abstract, inscribed by the author, and a second offprint of the Theory in another volume of pamphlets; which of the two offprints is the copy the younger Wedgwood carried south cannot now be told, and the present volume is the one in which the family kept the argument together. Playfair, for his part, sent Watt an inscribed copy of the biography as well, which survives separately in its blue wrappers, titled in ink on the cover by Watt; the copy bound here is the second that the Watts owned. Hutton's theory, which he called a system, postulated a cyclical history of the earth in four stages: the wearing down of existing land by water and air, the deposition of the debris as strata on the sea floor, the consolidation of those strata by the heat that lies beneath the crust, and their fracture and elevation by the same heat to form new continents. Part I presents the earth as a machine designed for the maintenance of life, in which the destruction of land is the necessary condition of soil, and therefore of plants and animals; Part II argues, from feldspar, flint, fossil wood, coal, rock salt and the agates of Hutton's own cabinet, that loose sediment becomes rock by heat and fusion, not by solution, and that the granite of Portsoy figured on Plate II crystallised from a fluid; Part III attributes the tilting and raising of strata to subterranean heat, draws the distinction between basalt, congealed under compression within the earth, and lava, erupted into the air, and reads the flowing of basalt among broken strata as the evidence of elevation; and Part IV makes the whole a steady state, in which, Hutton asks the reader to suppose, the continent that is to succeed our land is already beginning to appear above the water in the middle of the Pacific. The paper closes on p. 96 with the sentence that has defined it since: the result of our present enquiry is that we find "no vestige of a beginning,-no prospect of an end." The sentence denies nothing about creation; it says that the record in the rocks shows neither a first cycle nor a last. What was new was not any one of the parts, several of which had been proposed before, but the insistence that the whole could be studied from terrestrial materials alone, without cosmogony and without catastrophe, by examining rocks in their structural relations, attending to their mineral and chemical composition, and taking the processes now at work on the surface as the key to those that had worked before; the Dictionary of Scientific. Signed. …

Hardcover. First Thus. Octavo, [2], ix-xv (missing earlier pages), [1], 2**-2*****, [1], 4-168, 23, [1], *26-*41, [1], [3], 28-86, **86-***********86, 87-96, with plates. Fair; rebound in modern blue cloth boards with black cloth spine and corners, very little wear to edges or corners; binding tight; text block rough, uneven and age-toned; age-toning to pages, and deep foxing to middle signature pp 4-23; 2 plates present and intact labeled Pl. 4 and Pl. 5 with some offsetting; MF consignment. 1358322. Special Collections.…

Bristol : Printed By Bugin and Rosser, (1794), 8°, 48; 32 pp., 3 z.T. gefalt. Kupferstichtafeln; 2 feine Halbledereinbände mit Rvg. und Rückenschildern; feines Exemplar. Very Rare First Edition! Part I. A Familiar Explanation of the Principles on which Benefit may be expected from Factitious Airs in Various Diseases. Part II. Description of an Air Apparatus; with Hints respecting the Use and Properties of Different Elastic Fluids. By James Watt. Illustrations: The three plates show Watt's pneumatic apparatus for administering the gas. "This is the rare first edition of the Beddoes-Watt tract. In the second edition which was much expanded (1795: 168, 40 pp.) Beddoes states: "The former edition of this pamphlet, consisting of between 500 and 600 copies, appeared in the middle of October, 1794. The booksellers had disposed of most of the copies in a few weeks; and in less than four months a new impression became necessary." Of Watt's contribution the D.N.B. states: "Watt had his interest in chemical science still further stimulated by the hope of benefiting the health of his invalid son, Gregory, by the inhaling of gases, called in those days 'factitious airs.' This mode of cure was advocated by the celebrated Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and Watt devised an apparatus to be used in hospitals, and of a smaller size in private houses, for the generation of the 'airs,' and in 1795 published a pamphlet [the second edition], with illustrations, prices, and directions for use. Two principal 'airs' were to be produced, the one oxygen and the other hydro-carbonate; this appears to have been a mixture of hydrogen, carbonic acid, and some carbonic oxide. This horrible compound was not supposed to be of the best kind, nor to do its work properly, unless it had the effect of producing in the unhappy inhaler an attack of vertigo." Fulton & Stanton I,8 Nitrous Oxide : "The use of volatile agents to abrogate sensation had its primary origin in the work of three men: Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, and Humphry Davy. In 1772 Priestley discovered nitrous oxide, and he was also largely responsible for introducing the modem chemical study of the gases. He had not observed the exhilarating effects of nitrous oxide inhalation, but after discovering oxygen in 1774 he cautiously suggested that inhalation of certain gases might be of therapeutic benefit, particularly for diseases involving the lungs. His suggestion was taken up both in England and on the Continent, and Thomas Beddoes of Bristol was so impressed by Priestley's studies that in 1794 he and James Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, published a book on the medical uses of die so-called "factitious airs," which enjoyed great popularity." Fulton & Stanton, p.8 The first part by Beddoes covers experiments that he conducted on humans and animals subjected to inhaling various gases. "The most important contribution to the study of therapeutic inhalation in general was made by Thomas Beddoes." Duncum, The Development of Inhalation Anaesthesia, pp. 64-70. "Perhaps the first modern gas inhaler was the one that James Watts, an engineer, constructed for Thomas Beddoes." Thomas, E. Keys, The History of Surgical Anesthesia, p.83 John F. Fulton & Madeline E. Stanton, The Centennial of Surgical Anesthesia (1946), I, 8. *) Added: First Edition of Beddoes, Thomas & Watt, James: Medical Cases and Speculations; Including Parts IV. and V. of Considerations on the Medicinal Powers, and the Production of Factitious Airs. Bristol: J. Johnson, 1796. xv, (1), 2**-2*****, (1), 4-168, 23, (1), *26-*41, (1), (3), 28-86, **86-***********86, 87-96; with 2 plates (plate III and plate IV) (one plate in part 2, No. 3) and the second plate (No. IV) is not present.…