Historical Math and Science Blog

 The other day I tried to follow a citation for the Akademie der Wissenshaften, Berlin , the Mémoires , 1776. But I have little experience trying to look up these older journals, and was confused to find publications from the Berlin Academy , the  Königliche-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften , journals in Latin, French, and German, under names like  Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin, Avec les Mémoires pour la même Année, tirez Registres de cette Academie  and  Miscellanea Berolinensia . I've got a small amount of experience with these older publications, so I knew that you can often find collections, abstracts, summaries, and translations, but I couldn't find a reference on this "Berlin Academy" beyond the Wikipedia page for the Prussian Academy of  Sciences  (German:  Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften ) which featured a history of the Academy, but little on the publication history....

I just published my new video , which covers the Accademia del Cimento as well as Niccolo Cabeo, and their contributions to electrical science. This video took five months (!), from research, to translating (and brushing up on my Latin, which I had been neglecting), to making the music, to making CG renders of the Accademia's apparatus (by first learning Blender...) and finally editing. I've already mentioned the great pains I took transcribing the notes and diary of the Accademia del Cimento. Now, here is my working version of the translation of parts of Niccolo Cabeo's Philosophia Magnetica . I expect to revisit this translation soon. 

  As a follow-up to my recent post about the notes of the Accademia del Cimento , I've transcribed, formatted, and roughly translated (meaning Google Translate + light editing) excerpts from the diary of that same Academy, relating to electricity among other things. This includes a roughly translated and slightly edited version of the Notizie  of Giovannia Tagione Tozzetti (see previous post) which features the Essays  combined with the relevant excerpts from the diary. This took an outrageous amount of time to assemble, and the translating is in a terrible state, it's more of a convenience for anyone reading it to get the gist, so you don't have to put it into Google Translate yourself. I don't know Italian! The diary entries I used were from Ms. Gal. 262 ff. 61v-81r, 116v-117r, and some sheets from later relating to vacuum experiments. Full citation: Magalotti, Lorenzo. “Gal. 262 - V, Posteriori. 3, Accademia Del Cimento. Fisica Sperimentale.”  Firenze, n.d. I cite...

 I've been working late nights this week, practicing my transcribing. The reason is, I'd like to transcribe the handwritten notes used by the Accademia del cimento  (ca. 1657-1667), an early modern learned academy comprising a dozen or so members that published one of the first "lab manual"s for physics. Their publication, the Saggi  (Italian for essays ) was originally written in Italian, then translated to Latin and English. It was popular then, and it draws a fair amount of scholarly attention even today.  The manuscripts are available from the Museo Galileo archives, and they're pretty voluminous. Fortunately, the electrical experiments are fairly brief (as you'd expect around 1660), especially compared to the experiments in hydraulics and pneumatics, which is what the Saggi  are probably best remembered for.  The notes that I've located so far come under the title  Gal. 263 - V, Posteriori. 4, Accademia del Cimento. Fisica sperimentale. fol. 84r -...

 I was going through Park Benjamin Jr.'s The Intellectual Rise in Electricity   (1895) and it provided an interesting look at the earliest history of electricity and magnetism. The most notable aspects were the historical myths that he dispels. This will be a short post to try to help promote better historiography.  The first point of note is that Thales of Miletus (typically pronounced "tahlees" or "taylees") is often given credit as the first to record observations of the attractive nature of amber. Sources such as Wikipedia list that Thales rubbed amber with fur to produce attraction, and in another article Wikipedia gives four different citations to substantiate the claim; other sources say it was silk , but it seems it is always Thales of Miletus.  And yet, the only references we have to substantiate the claim - that Thales ever commented on the "amber effect" - are the work of Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers , who quotes Aristot...

Inspired by Aris Makrides on hsm.stackexchange.com, I've decided to translate an old French paper by Joseph Diaz Gergonne, relating to logic. The paper is significant for being one of the earliest uses of the symbols $\subset$ and $\supset$ (which were written as C and Ɔ). Below you'll find the draft translation, which I may or may not revisit. I was able to finish the translation in one month by translating about 1 hour per day (to a rough draft).   Thanks to Calvin Khor, the typesetting for this translation is now much improved. I'll still leave the original LaTeX file here for anyone to tinker with as they see fit.  Some notes on terminology.  The most significant choice I had to make was how to translate étendue , which is defined by Larousse as dimension de quelque chose considéré dans l'espace qu'il occupe  (dimension of something considered in the space which it occupies). Direct translations might include extensiveness , or  extent ; I fo...

One of my pet projects over the last couple years has been translating the two parts of Simeon-Denis Poisson's Mémoire Sur la Distribution de l'Électricité à la surface des Corps conducteurs ;  (read 1812) into English. I didn't dedicate all that much time to it, the full memoires together are only 200 pages or so, so it shouldn't have taken so long, but in any case, 2021 has been a good year of translations for me, so I thought, I might as well put an hour every day into the translation. And now the first memoir is complete!  Translator's Preface The story of this work begins, for our purposes, with Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736-1806), the military engineer-turned-natural philosopher, who, beginning in 1785, published a series of seven memoirs on the topics of electricity and magnetism. Coulomb used his recently developed torsion balance  to make some of the earliest quantitative measurements of the electrostatic force. He performed these measurements using a fine...