MARTIN, Thomas Commerford. [Nikola Tesla].
The Inventions Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla. With Special Reference to His Work in Polyphase Currents and High Potential Lighting.
New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894.
$950,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-119204
+$500
The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla; inscribed by Nikola Tesla to Civil War Major and Assistant U.S. Treasurer General Daniel Butterfield
Scarce edition of Thomas Commerford Martin's landmark work in the field of electrical engineering, detailing the research and inventions of brilliant inventor, Nikola Tesla. Octavo, original cloth, patterned endpapers, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Tesla, illustrated with numerous diagrams throughout. Presentation copy, inscribed by Nikola Tesla in Serbian Cyrillic on the second free endpaper, "Prijatelju D. Butterfield, Nikola Tesla" which translates as "My friend D. Butterfield, Nikola Tesla." The recipient, Daniel Butterfield, was a Civil War Major General and was the head of one of Cold Spring, New York's first families. Injured on the third day of Gettysburg, he received the Medal of Honor for his actions at Gaines Mill, Virginia, and is credited with adapting the current bugle call into Taps, the most famous bugle call in history. He later became Assistant U.S. Treasurer during the Grant administration and played a major role in the scheme (in which Grant himself participated) that caused the major collapse in the price of gold, on September 24, 1869, known as Black Friday. An inscribed association of this caliber, linking one of the foremost inventors of the modern age with a figure so deeply woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century American history, is of the utmost rarity. The connection between the two men speaks to the social world Tesla moved within during his most productive years, when his laboratory drew the attention of financiers, military men, and public figures alike, and it lends this volume a documentary significance far exceeding that of an ordinary presentation copy. First published in 1894, Commerford's landmark text was reprinted twice that year (this being the third printing which is identical to the previous printings and equally as scarce). In near fine condition. Housed in a custom full morocco clamshell box. From the library of August John Pacini, the head of the Department of Biophysical Research at the Victor X-Ray Corporation, Chicago, with a small presentation slip from his wife laid in. The Pacini provenance is itself fitting, given the institution's pioneering work in the very field of x-ray imaging that Tesla himself helped to inaugurate through his early high-frequency experiments. Exceptionally rare, not only does the present title scarcely come to market, but no other copy inscribed by Tesla has ever appeared in auction records.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), inventor, electrical engineer, and physicist, was one of the most brilliant and visionary scientific minds of the modern age, best remembered for his pivotal contributions to the design of the alternating current (AC) electricity supply system that powers the world today. Born to Serbian parents in the village of Smiljan, then part of the Austrian Empire, Tesla emigrated to the United States in 1884 and worked briefly for Thomas Edison before the two parted ways, setting the stage for the celebrated War of the Currents, in which Tesla’s alternating current, backed by the industrialist George Westinghouse, triumphed over Edison’s direct current as the standard for electrical power distribution. Tesla’s invention of the induction motor and his polyphase system of AC transmission, patented in the late 1880s, made possible the practical, long-distance delivery of electricity, and his system was chosen to illuminate the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and, shortly afterward, to harness the power of Niagara Falls at the Adams Power Plant, in one of the defining engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. The present work, compiled and edited by Thomas Commerford Martin, then editor of The Electrical Engineer, gathered together Tesla’s lectures, articles, patents, and discussions into a single authoritative volume, and remains among the most important early documents of his career and the fullest contemporary record of his achievements. Its appearance in 1894 came at the very height of Tesla’s fame, following his triumphant demonstrations at the Columbian Exposition the previous year, and it served to cement his reputation as one of the defining scientific minds of the age. A brilliant experimenter and a showman of genius, Tesla conducted pioneering work with high-frequency and high-voltage currents, electrical discharge tubes, early x-ray imaging, and wireless transmission, demonstrating his startling results to celebrities, financiers, and wealthy patrons at his New York laboratory. Throughout the 1890s and beyond he pursued his grand ambition of wireless lighting and the worldwide wireless distribution of electric power, carrying out his famous high-voltage experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899 and beginning, though never completing, the great transmitting tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. Tesla’s inventions met with varying degrees of success, and in his later years, increasingly solitary and impoverished, he acquired the reputation of the archetypal mad scientist for his claims of communicating with other planets and his announcements of fantastical devices; he died in near poverty in a New York hotel room in 1943. Yet his legacy has only grown in the decades since, his name given to the tesla, the international unit of magnetic flux density, his prophetic vision of a wireless world abundantly vindicated, and his achievements recognized as among the foundations upon which the entire edifice of modern electrical science rests. Original works documenting his career, and above all any material bearing his signature, are eagerly sought by collectors and institutions alike.
The Inventions Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla. With Special Reference to His Work in Polyphase Currents and High Potential Lighting.
$950,000.00
In Stock