A. Ganot - Cours de Physique - 1859

GANOT (Adolphe). A Course of Purely Experimental Physics for the Use of Society Figures, instead of the brevet supérieur aspirants, for teachers of normal schools, for ladies' institutions and, in general, for people outside mathematical knowledge. Paris, at the author-publisher’s, 1859. 1 volume large octavo, [half-title, title], 530 pages, half red morocco, spine with raised bands ornamented with gilt garlands of foliage, gilt lines and dots, marbled paper boards (binding of the period). First edition.

Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) was a professor of physics in Paris. He is the author of the Traité élémentaire de physique (1851), the most widely distributed physics manual of the nineteenth century, translated into about a dozen languages. With this Course, he provides a version without formulas intended for women and fashionable society. He published and disseminated it himself from rue de Vaugirard.

The work is divided into eight books:

- General properties and universal attraction (levers, pendulum, metronome, capillarity);
- Liquids (Pascal’s barrel, hydraulic press, Baumé and Gay-Lussac hydrometers, milk scale);
- Gases (Magdeburg hemispheres, Torricelli experiment, fire pump, aerostats and parachute);
- Acoustics;
- Calorics (Papin’s pot, Franklin’s boiling, hygrometer with a hair, winds);
- Light (Fresnel lighthouse, Newton’s and Herschel’s telescopes, magic lantern, phantasmagoria, dissolving views, diorama and Daguerre’s daguerreotype, photography on paper, stereoscope);
- Magnetism;
- Electricity (Leyden jar, electrical puppets and egg, Volta’s cannon, pile, electroplating, gilding, telegraph and Morse alphabet, electric fishes).

It is illustrated with 308 marginal drawings in the text. Gagniet drew them. Quarteley, Dujardin and Lambert engraved them in wood, and E. Salle on copper. The book bears witness to the incredible scientific leap under the Second Empire, whose new image techniques (photography, stereoscopy, light projection) and the telegraph were on the eve of the rise of industrial electricity.

Fine copy: small flaw to a headband, light wear to the edges, the other defects are minor.

First editions in a refined period binding are fairly uncommon.