English Translation of Leibniz, "Historia inventionis phosphori" (1710)
I came across this paper by Leibniz a couple years ago while researching the experiments of Francis Hauksbee for my YouTube series on the Experimental History of Electricity . My Latin wasn't quite good enough to read the paper fluently, so I came back to it now and again to work through it once more, and judge my progress. The last hurdle was translating Leibniz's poem on phosphorus, an excerpt from a longer epicedium (Latin mourning poem) for Duke Johannus Friderick. You can actually find my questions on both the prose and the poetry on sites like History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange, and the Latin subreddit. I'm very grateful for everyone's help and input. This translation was also notable for being the first where I turned to ChatGPT for helping to understand allusions, parse tricky Latin passages, and review my translations for errors. It rarely provided complete accuracy, but it was enough to get me unstuck, or correct misunderstandings I had. None ...