JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Questionable Quidity and the Road to Achieving a Faster and More Productive Smoking-Related Disease

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Cigarette manufacturers–like anyone other entity in business–want their clients to consume as much product as possible. Or buy their goods as often as possible. With that in mind I’m a little surprised that the Big Five never adopted any of the ideas shown below, all helping the smoker to get at their next cigarette as quickly as possible. For example, in the event hat there were no ashtrays around, several people patented their notions for in-the-cigarette-pack ashtrays, so that no matter where a person was, they could always clicks their ash and stow their butts back in the pack. Of course, I’m sure that the Makers determined almost instantly that this concern affects perhaps an immeasurable percentage of smokers; if someone wanted (read “needed”) a cig, and there was no ash tray, they can just, well, smoke their cigarette and not use an ash tray. Or go outside. OR something. Or perhaps the manufacturers recognized that they could actually sell the idea to some of their smokers, but then realized instantly that carrying around ciggie waste is not attractive and perhaps a stinking mess. Or they recognized that–like Lee Iaccoca fighting seat belts because it made cars look “unsafe”–having place to deposit cigarette waste right there with the cigarettes might send a message to the consumer that their product is messy and in the end very unattractive. Best leave the unattractive bits in a tray somewhere else. Or of course share the end product of smoking enjoyment with others by leaving it on the ground.

Then of course to remind consumers how useful the process of smoking is, there were other inventions that combined the products of this act with some other highly useful enterprise, like this cigarette lighter/pencil sharpener with what might have been a whistle attachment:

And if you found yourself needing/wanting a smoke but didn’t have a free hand, there was always the following device, which allowed the consumer to smoke their stuff through a tube:

Speaking to the humility of smokers was this device that allowed the user to extinguish their smoking product automatically, no matter what the size of the burning member, reminding the user that if they wanted to actually stop, they could:

Again, another extension of the art of cigarette smoking and how useful smoking implements can be–the cigarette lighter with built-in flashlight:

Cigarette lighter with built-in extinguisher:

Pen with built-in cigarette lighter (1977):

And another example of a very complicated instrument for extinguishing a cigarette, sending a message with I-don’t-know-what undertones:

These are just some of the many glorious appendages to smoking and making it easier–many more can be found at the U.S. Patent Office, like all of the examples above.

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DIY Do it Yourself Antique Baseball Games, 1883-1910

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1503

Interested in some summer projects for the kids and their friends? Try one of these–I’ve scooped them out of the U.S. Patent Office, and I think that a person could make any of the six games shown below with stuff from around the house (or thereabouts). Some will take a little effort, but I think that everything is here–simply save the images and print them out as a template–and then away you go. In each instance I have included the text from the original patent, describing how the game is to be played. Enjoy!

Miniature Baseball Game, 1910

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Steampunk Baseball Patents, 1875-1910

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1504

When I think of old-timey baseball, the images of roomy woolen uniforms, cigars-on-trains, daytime games, underpaid stars, heavy baseballs, and, um. “colorful” nicknames spring to mind. And back in there, eighty or a hundred years ago, baseball has had its minor league steampunk days, much like most other things: sporty adventures filled with outsized protective bits, simple things turned into fancy mega-geared complexities, over-the-top metal extrusions, steely encumbrances, and over-thought subtleties turned into under-thought necessaries.

Take for example the following baseball glove from 1905. The sport was four or five decades old at this point, yet there was a person, still, who came up with an idea for a baseball mitt so bad that it must’ve burnt the pen used to draw it. Not only does the glove make it very difficult for the player to run, but also makes it rather difficult for anything else to happen, too.

I’m not sure when the first batting practice cages appeared (much like I can never remember when the first pinstripes appeared, or the real year for the first players with numbers on their backs), but this one from 1909 seems rather early, and comes complete with derby-and-sports-coated pitcher:

I do like this swinging apparatus, perhaps more for the idea of it, or the design, than anything else:

And this is quite lovely: a paper dispenser for home plate, so that the base could always be easily seen by all involved. The paper was located underneath the base, and pulled across for new paper when dirty. Why the umpire couldn’t just sweep it clean with their little umpire brushes like they do now, I don’t know:

This series of diagrams for a night game lighting system (1904) are lovely things in themselves, particularly the second drawing (“figure 3”):

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I have a sort spot for any sort of movable, paper calculator, calculating anything: the gas mileage for a 1960 Rambler, air speed calculators for planes, effects of nuclear explosions, and of course a multi-disc baseball game schedule calculator (1909):

This gorgeous beast was a heavy, wooden apparatus for a full-scale solitary baseball game, much like its predecessor table-top varieties, only bigger, much bigger:

The full-scale environment above came with an automatic pitching device, seen below, a fantastic thing, and beautiful in its gear-y complexity:

For some reason this glove reminds me of cake (1895):

As much as I wanted this to be a full-size robo-pitcher, it wasn’t: it is though a lovely little version of a pitching robot, a toy with what looks like real staying power:

This is just a good idea, though it would be hard to store these things if you went to 20 or 30 games a year for a few decades:

These are simply terrific drawings, though the glove looks very cumbersome (1895):

Its interesting to see that in just a decade-and-a-half that the baseball glove is starting to look like something more modern:

The proposal for bases with bells in them might’ve seemed helpful to the non-baseball-person inventor, but, well, it really wasn’t, but the idea gets a complete-and-total pass since it came a year before the Centennial:

This is interesting to me as I can’t recall if I knew how long baseballs have been stitched in the same way, or how long the seams of the ball have been in the predictably same pattern from ballclub to ballclub–and I still don’t. This is an 1876 proposal for a baseball ball covering, different from what we know–I don’t know much about the history of the ball itself:

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Newton and his 351st Trinity Anniversary: a Note on Ending his Research in Alchemy.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1505

I’ve made a number of posts on this blog regarding the anniversaries of the Trinity atomic test explosion on 16 July 1945, out there in the desert–actually in the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man/Dead Man’s Walk, near Socorro, New Mexico. Its a bad piece of land if you wanted to cross it, especially if you went north-to-south, a hundred mile bit of an unrelenting waterless world.

But that’s not the Trinity I want to talk about now–today’s Trinity is about as far removed from the flat piece of dry New Mexican earth as you can get, being the beautifully maintained Renaissance grasses of Trinity College at Cambridge. The call to this Trinity, today, is in observation of the 351st anniversary of the arrival of Issac Newton (1642-1727) at that college. 1660 is not an auspicious year in Newton’s history, necessarily, but it is the beginning–Newton’s enormous years would come in just a little bit, getting well underway during the Plague Years in 1665/1666, when he left the school to ride out the nasties in his native Woolsthorpe¹.

Myk favorite image of Trinity is the one above, printed not too long after Newton’s return², and after he had set up his own alchemy lab in a lean-to shack against the wall of the school (slightly visible here in the lower right corner.). Newton’s decades-long run in the alchemy turnstile is well known, but what I’d like to know is why he gave it up.

My feeling is that Newton believed he was missing a big something in his way of looking at and understnanding, expressing, the world. I think that he recognized the failing of physics and math to explain the vitalism (in the alchemical sense) of the world, and that alchemy might provide it. Thinking that this vital agent was in a way divine, in a way a product of divine interaction and participation, Newton may have used alchemy in the hopes that this area of study .would get him closer to that cause of all spontaneous processes that would explain all of the varieties and vagaries of living stuff. He might have viewed this creative process in the Old Testament sense of god using light at the beginning of the world, activity life in nothingness; Newton may have actually thought of this process as alchemical in nature.

There has been much written on Newton and alchemy, and I know almost nothing about it. Knowing the anniversary was upon us, and seeing the print of Trinity, and seeing again that little shack where Newton spent so much concentrated effort, all conspired to make me think about what led Newton to give it all up. He stopped just as he was leaving the school for London to become director of the Mint, undertaking a big change in his life. His superhuman insight was about done by this point, even though his Optics would come a little later on, in 1704–most of that work was already completed, with Newton waiting, perhaps, for any troubles that he felt he was going to have upon the book’s publication to fade away. And in this case, the problematic part did fade away, into dust, with the death of his long-worn enemy, Robert Hooke, in 1703. And its not that Newton faded away over the next few decades, he was still an exceptional powerhouse of an intellect to the very last, molding the new Scientific Revolution from his position as president of the Royal Society. And hen there was the oversight of the Mint.

But he pretty much gave up alchemy around 1697, and that, as they say, was that. I wonder what it was that he found or didn’t find; whatever it was, it wasn’t among the million or so very chosen/careful/hidden/coded words in his (very) private (and not-intended-to-be-published) writings on the subject. What was in that final dot at the end of the last recorded sentence on alchemy, I wonder?

The other part of this print of Trinity that I so love is in the foreground, where the artist–or engraver–decided for whatever reason to include a tiny scene of two fighting/playing dogs. Dogs and the shack, and the rest of the grandeur.

Notes:

1. Newton graduated in 1665 without any particularly noted academic achievement. Of the plague years, Newton wrote: “All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since.”

Newton returned to the school in 1667 and was made a (minor) fellow; he took his masters in 1668, and in 1669, by the appearance and promise of his great genius, Newton was named Lucasian professor, filling the seat of Isaac Barrow. Newton was 27 years old.

“The more Newton’s theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work is examined as a whole corpus, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in his moments of grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God’s will in actions, living on the fulfillment of times.”–F.E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974).

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German Art Between the Wars

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As it turns out there is a low-level significant assembly of published German art and book covers here in the Rancho Deluxe–its not a collection because that would imply too much order; it is barely an assembly. There’s just a lot of it here, segregated, because I liked whatever it was/is.

These are some examples of a life-underground, or underground actions, that appeared in the pages of the great illustrated newspaper, the Illustrirte Zeitung.

The first is by Willi Munch(-khe), a Jugendstil artist (1885-1961), a very expressive, and dark, interpretation of what should be done with German politicians in the ripe days following the end of WWI. This image, published aorund 1922/23, shows a decorated and fancy spats-wearing politician being booted into the hole of hell. The book he is carrying (Geheme Kabinet-Politik Aller Landes/Secret Political Rules of Our Country or thereabouts), seems to be broken, its pages spilling out to feed the fires of the nasty inferno, lighting and heating the way for the failing pol as the devils and monsters await his arrival, much to the controlled agreement of the monster-y spectators in the hell galleries.

We can guess why the man/symbol is being sent to the ring of fire–the tattered, worn, hobnailed boot with the old patched pants above, the myriad of tombstones, the water-filled bomb craters,m the completely shattered trees, the bombed out cities, and of course the witches and death riding a speckled fire-breathing horse in a dark sky, pretty much round out the picture of “why”. Several years after the end of the war and into a problematic realm of the democratic Weimar Republic, and just freshly into the hyperinflation that wiped out whatever the middle class had managed to save (banknote denominations climbing to literally astronomical levels, reaching 1×10¹⁴), there was a lot to complain about.

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A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things, Part 75: Attracting Kisses and Repelling Sharks

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Part of a long series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things, here.

It was necessary to just upload these images as quickly as possible, otherwise they’d’ve been lost in the gurgle and crush of other images–they’re excellent additions to one of this blogs longest series of posts (Blank, Empty and Missing Things). The first image is a drawing from a (recent!) Patent Office report for a shark repellent suit–I guess most folks would think of chemicals or something along those lines, but this patent reached back into time’s dusty bins to retrieve this retro-Medieval inside-out Iron Maiden suit. Seems to me that there’s not a lot of room for a tank on this.

I particularly like the following images as they make room for both sexes to fill the arms of the filled-in person. The 3-D experience was supposed to make you feel as though you “were there”. and maybe in 1953 (or whatever) it was the closest thing to an exterior virtual reality that there was.

And this:

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Questionable Quidity: Swimming Pool Atomic Bomb Shelter -with- Nuclear Weapons Explosion Direction Finder.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1506

Part of the long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

At first this patent sounded somewhat reasonable–assuming that you were going to build an in-ground pool, and assuming that you thought that the Soviets were going to be bombing soon, and assuming that you weren’t living in an area of the United States that would be pulverized by thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives, then it might actually make sense to build this thing. At the very least, if you lived in Tornado Alley, the bomb shelter could be very useful in non-bomb but tornado-threatening scenarios. Of course, you wouldn’t have to build anything so substantial (with a pool attached) to survive a tornado attack, but if Uncle was in the cement business, you might as well.

This next bit might not really belong in the Questionable Quidities department, as it doe shave some real utility for the survivors of nuclear holocaust. After the explosions are done, and after the firestorms have burned themselves out because there’s nothing left to combust and, well, also because the “local” oxygen in the vicinity of the intense fires has been used up, after people have determined that they have survived, it would be important to know from which direction the blast came. If you know the direction of the explosion, and some of the atmospheric conditions at the time of the blast and immediately following, and had some tech equipment,and medical stuff, you might be able to figure out the coming effects of the attack. What you do with that, I’m not so sure.

Another major conditional here is that there was only one blast. If the place that was being bombed was worthy of one warhead, it was worthy of more, usually; so the collapsable sphere might be bent in from all directions, if there were two or three blasts, which means I guess that the thing wasn’t worth installing to begin with. ALso, if you’re in a vicinity that could require one of these buggers and you were just the recipient of, say, 200 megatons of explosions, and survived the blast, you could probably just reach for your KYAG Handbook to see how many hours you had left on the planet.

Then again this really wasn’t meant as a civilian app.

Another

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Hangman–the Game and the Not-Game

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1507

“Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies, Ashes, ashes, we all fall down”

In the history of killing in the United States, the segment that is most documented and recorded is the killing done by the Colonial governments and by the representatives of the United States federal and state institutions. Since 1608 when the first person (brought to North America from Europe) was executed there have been some 20,000 executions. The earliest part of this procedure was accomplished by crushing, breaking on the wheel, firing squad, and bludgeoning, and then occasionally by burning at the stake (the last of these unfortunates perishing in 1825 in this manner). In the modern era, most executions were accomplished by hanging, and then the electric chair, though now almost all executions are done by lethal injection. People are executed now mainly for committing crimes of aggravated murder and, occasionally, for felony murder. Earlier on, people were done in for far less: arson, burglary, criminal assault, conspiracy to commit murder, counterfeiting, desertion, espionage, robbery, theft, train robbing and witchcraft all had their day, though most of these offenses ceased being capital punishment cases long ago.

Hanging hung on, so to speak, for a long time, and became part of our culture, to one degree or another–so much so that it became a part of a toy and game for children: the game “Hangman”. In this game a player would be given x-chances to determine a hidden word; each miss of a letter would result in adding a feature to an already-drawn gallows; after adding the head, torso, arms, legs, feet, hat or whatever without resolution of the hidden word, the player would be hanged, dead. A weird game, and something that I’ve played many times, without really thinking about the consequences.

Its a little similar to the old nursery rhyme (above), which may or may not come from the plague years in England (1664/5), the words referring to the marks around the red spots appearing on the bodies of the infected; the posies being a sweet smelling bit that was supposed to ward off the disease which was believed to be brought on by breathing bad smells; and the ashes, of course, are our own at death.

Somehow these things enter our heads without any real connection to the real thing, and we pass it down to our kids. Its a small bit, I think, but I don’t think we’ll be using a gallows to play our next hidden-word game.

This is what started this post: a 1977 Patent Office report on a 3-D gallows to be used with the word guessing game. Drawing the figure out is bad enough; having the gallows, complete with an articulated victim, is, well, another matter entirely.

“A hangman game comprising: a miniature three dimensional gallows having a platform including an operable trap door and a noose pendently suspended over the trap door; component means for constructing a representation of a human figure to be suspended from said noose, said component means including separate head, torso, arm and leg components; said components carrying mutually engageable magnetic buttons for removably engaging said components to each other to construct said representation in steps starting with said head component; said head component being proportioned to be carried in said noose.”

Here’s another, and more recent, example, though this one is digitally displayed:

This last example from 1976 does away with the gallows but keeps the articulated condemned, while adding a rather complex electrical board for the guessing part.

Then there’s the real thing.

The next patent drawing offers a novel idea–turning the gallows into a strangulation machine. This patent specifically attempts to prevent the neck of the convicted from being broken, the machine instead raising the person slowly, so that they suffocate under their own weight. The thing about the old-time executioners was to do their jobs cleanly, efficiently, and without any unnecessary struggles to the condemned. That said, it was the aim of most of them–at least for the public executions in England, the only parts of this gory history that I’ve read about–to kill the condemned by snapping the neck without ripping off the head or tearing open the neck, so that the person is basically dead as soon as he or she makes the drop. The only thing left there in the body would be a beating heart, or so that is what the executioners aimed for.

Here’s another gallows changed into a strangulation contrivance of great complexity:

This one was designed so that there would be no stairs to climb, the condemned being strangled to death by raising the roof to which the neck was attached. Also in this way no one touches the condemned, making it a hands-off approach to an excruciating act of vengeance and punishment.

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The Emptiness of John Wayne Movie Posters

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post to the Blank, Empty & Missing Things series

I don’t know that I’ll ever really have the cultural appreciation of why or how movie posters (like those below) were able to attract people to come and see the movie. They look like, well, like nothing. They’re lovely, in their own way, but to me they do little to excite the imagination of what the movie might be about, unless of course all the movies were about the same thing, and since the star of all of them was John Wayne, maybe that’s all people needed to know.

Honestly, now–how exciting and/or revealing is this?

Or this?

Ditto:

And ?:

I guess it was all John Wayne.

Many more below:

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The Eyes of Hank Quinlan–Touch of Evil, 1958

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Hank Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven’t got any.
Hank Quinlan: What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up. –from Touch of Evil, 1958 (Hank was played by Orson Welles; Tanya, his once-upon-a-time squeeze, by Marlene Dietrich.)

This has been one of my all-time favorite films, though I don’t want to actually see the thing too often. It is sharp as glass, with hardly any grays in sight, mostly oblique black and white, giving the film a very “removed” feeling, cold, isolating. Orson of course is a magnificent beast, the enormous shell of a spent bully with virtually nothing left to move around except for his undulating fat and a sliver of power, wielding that jiggly memory with eyeballs so puffy and dead that I do not know to this day how he achieved that pus-y look. His entrance into the film is remarkable–big black car door opens, and the gigantic Orson pulls himself out, his pig-bristle slough-eyed face way too close to the camera for comfort.

It is an odd movie, but just about every still you see from the thing is like a stand-apart photograph, a movie composed of 55,000 individual images.

The screenplay was written by Welles, though it may have been influenced by a novel by Whit Masterson (actually a pseudonym for another pseudonym, Wade Miller, which was the entity of Robert Wade and William Miller, which is entirely too much rigorous hidenness for such a modest effort) called Badge of Evil (1956). This doesn’t matter; the whole deal about the film is the brain behind the staging and filming, which belonged of course to Mr. Welles.

All I really wanted to do with this piece today was post a variety of Touch of Evil movie posters. Here they are:

This isn’t the entrance I was talking about–can’t find it–but this view of Orson is pretty good (comes at about 3:30):

Schwartz: Well, Hank was a great detective all right.
Tanya: And a lousy cop.
Schwartz: Is that all you have to say for him?
Tanya: He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

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How Fish and a Dog Nearly Prevented the Publication of Newton’s Principia

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1508

Well, not really, no. But sort of–when you open up the Big Book of Big Discovery, and go to the “N” section, and read about the Principia, the fish and the dog will at least be there.

The story of Edmond Halley and his wide importance in getting Isaac Newton to write what may be among the most supreme efforts in the history of science is very well known. In pursuit of an answer to an excellent question put to him and Robert Hooke by Sir Christopher Wren in a London coffeehouse, Halley pursued his answer to the very doorstep of Newton, right to Cambridge, in a personal visit. Newton of course knew the answer and knew more than the question, as his response provoked some of the deepest thoughts in the history. The answer to Wren’s question involved something much bigger than what he knew, and it took Newton to recognize the elemental issue at play. Of course the answer would require a lot of collected observations and accurate data, which Halley could certainly provide via John Flamsteed (who was the founder of the Greenwich Observatory, and the first astronomer royal of England), but the answer involved the ability to do the calculations in a fundamentally different way. It was the genius of Newton through and through that made the Principia (the full title by the way being Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which is Latin for “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), the Essential Book, but without the intercession and data provided by Halley, the whole deal gets a little muddy.

I can imagine that Hooke, who even though had come to the top of Newton’s s-list, knew how he could answer the question, and knew that it was Newton that he needed to see, but he just couldn’t do it. As a matter of fact the Hooke/Newton business would get a little deeper as the Principia came closer to publication, with Hooke claiming some priority and influence in the ideas forming Book III–a claim that nearly prevented Newton from publishing that section of the work–but Halley again stepped in and smoothed the matter over, at least for the sake of publication. Hooke though didn’t let go, and neither did Newton, whose ultimate revenge over Hooke was by living significantly longer.

He was prodded into publishing by Halley, who flattered and beguiled and pushed and preened and all the rest, skillfully managing the spectacular and difficult Newton, pressing him to completion. It might be said, I think, that had Halley not been there to press Newton along, the Principia might not have been written at all, and we would know Sir Isaac for other things, but perhaps not for his great masterpiece.

Aside from Halley’s insistence, there was also the issue of money and getting the Principia printed, and even though the Royal Society had given its imprimatur¹ on Newton’s project and had agreed to see it published, the publication was not necessarily a done deal.. The Royal Society hadn’t gotten gotten over its disastrous investment in Francis Willoughby’s History of Fishes (1686)²–an expensive edition with beautiful illustrations, a project that they funded but which just didn’t sell. And so the Society was a little gun shy, and tight. As a matter of fact, Halley was at the time under consideration for the position of subordinate clerk, and was to receive a salary of 50 pounds (a substantial amount for the time) but was to be paid in copies of Willoughby’s book, which was evaluated as one pound per copy (so Halley would make 50 copies of the Willoughby book for his work, per year). But Halley guaranteed to pay for the publication of the Principia, paying for the thing out of his own pocket.

Luckily Halley wasn’t dependent upon his income as clerk, having inherited a legacy as well as a number of productive properties from his father³. Halley had at least an inheritance of 150-200 pounds from his father’s estate, not including 60 pounds that he received every year before his father died. In addition to the cash was “property in several parishes in the city of London, including 13 houses in Winchester Street, two others on Canon Street…[others]…and the Dog Tavern.” Halley was making enough money from the property investments to live a comfortable life, plus he had his own sources of income, plus he was living in a house without payment, also inherited from his father. Halley was comfortable.

There was evidently one piece of property that was a major source of trouble to Halley’s father and which it seems for a time threatened the stability of the family’s legacy–the Dog Tavern. But the elder Halley–also named Edmond–overcame those issues and held onto his other properties without major liabilities, and was able to make his bequest to the younger Halley, who was then (after much else happens) able to proceed funding the publication of the Principia.⁴

Notes:

1. Following the Halley visit in 1684 (August) Newton would send his De motu off to the Royal Society (received 10 December) ; after two and a half years of work on 28 April 1686 Newton’s sent the Principia, Book I to the Royal Society, which on 19 May decided to publish it and which liscensed the book (via Samuel Pepys, the President of the Royal Society) on 30 June.

2. The book was actually completed by John Ray following the death of Willoughby.

3. That information comes from an article I read yesterday which sparked this post (Cook, Alan (07/01/1991). “Edmond Halley and Newton’s Principia. Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, 45 (2), p. 129}, Cook determining through his own careful research that Halley had ample funding to take care of the Principia (and also why it might have taken Halley so many months to make his trip to Cambridge, rather than just heading off to see Newton straight away from his coffeehouse meeting with Wren and Hooke).

4. After it was all said and done, it looks as though the entire printing (300-400 copies, including 100 copies for presentation) of the first edition of the Principia cost under 100 pounds. Part of this cost was offset because a number of copies were sold as sheets that were to be bound by the purchaser. The second edition of 1713, with a print run of about 700 copies, cost 117 pounds. It is interesting to note that the prices paid for copies of the first edition of the Principia didn’t reach their astronomical proportions until the last decade or so, when lovely copies might demand a million dollars or more. A.N.L. Munby (Munby, A N L (10/01/1952). “The Distribution of the First Edition of Newton\’s \’Principia\’”. Notes and records of the Royal Society of London (0035-9149), 10 (1), p. 28) determines that he average price for the 17 copies of the Principia sold during the 1930’s at auction was about 50 pounds, and that a signed presentation copy made 1 pound (!!) at auction in 1894. Munby makes a good observation that the copy of the Principia for the Learned Gentleman’s library in days gone by wouldn’t necessarily have been the first edition, but the best edition, which would’ve made that the third edition of 1726.

See also:

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