Electricorum Effectuum Explicatio

£2,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Rare, sole edition of geologist, physicist, mathematician and Benedictine monk Andreas Bina’s (1724-92) study on the source and nature of electricity. We have found just five copies in US institutions. Bina is perhaps best known for his study on earthquakes, and as the inventor of a rudimentary seismograph. Earth tremors he understood to be the result of electrical discharge; indeed, among the topics covered in this treatise is that one, on p.55, ‘Vis electrica sitne caussa motus Planetarum’, along with the contention that electricity and gravitation are of the same nature (Poirier, p.286). ‘Bina saw the cause of fire, of light and of electrical matter in what he called elasticity’, and vibration, exploring both in the ‘new experiments’ that form the basis of this treatise. Bina was in good company in this period - along with Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestley - in advocating that electricity played a role in seismic activity: ‘by the second half of the eighteenth century electricity was regarded as a natural agent that could account for several disruptive ‘unusual appearances’. Not only lightning, but also earthquakes, whirlpools and whirlwinds were explained in terms of the motion of the electric fire’ (Bertucci, p.89). The study of electricity particularly as it pertained to earthquakes flourished in Italy especially in this period, due in no small part to the frequency of seismic events - with devastating impact - in the Italian states. It was one such earthquake in

• Binding: Hardcover

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