De magnete, seu rota perpetui motus, libellus

by Petrus Peregrinus, Pierre de Maricourt, Achilles Pirmin Gasser

$400,000 · Offered by Sophia Rare Books

First edition

Augsburg: Philipp Ulhart the Elder , 1558. / First edition, of the greatest rarity, of “one of the most impressive scientific treatises of the Middle Ages… the first extant treatise on the properties and applications of magnets” DSB , published more than forty years before William Gilbert's De magnete 1600 and written almost three centuries earlier. The earliest description of the pivoted compass. Couched as a letter

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