“EINSTEIN EQUATED MAXWELL WITH NEWTON”: MAXWELL’S TREATISE ON ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, 1873

MAXWELL, James Clerk. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873. Two volumes. Octavo, original maroon cloth, uncut. Housed in a custom clamshell box.    $16,500.

First edition, first issue, of Maxwell’s most detailed and comprehensive work, advancing ideas that would become essential for modern physics, including the landmark hypothesis that light and electricity are the same in their ultimate nature.

The Treatise “extended Maxwell’s ideas beyond the scope of his earlier work in many directions, producing a highly fecund demonstration of the special importance of electricity to physics as a whole. He began the investigation of moving frames of reference, which in Einstein’s hands were to revolutionize physics; gave proofs of the existence of electromagnetic waves that paved the way for Hertz’s discovery of radio waves; worked out connections between the electrical and optical qualities of bodies that would lead to modern solid-state physics; and applied Tait’s quaternion formulae to the field equations, out of which Heaviside and Gibbs would develop vector analysis” (Norman). “The greatest theoretical physicist of the 19th century… Einstein equated Faraday with Galileo and Maxwell with Newton” (PMM). “Maxwell most clearly prefigures 20th-century physics” (Simmons). First issue; copies of the first issue have been found both with and without a publisher’s catalogue bound in Volume II (the text of which contains an issue point). This copy is bound without the catalogue. It does have the errata slip in Volume I, but not in Volume II, as is the case in other first issue printings. Horblit 72. Norman 1466. Simmons, Scientific 100, 64. Occasional marginal ink owner annotations in German, most heavily on pages 434 and 435 of Volume II.

Interiors fine; light rubbing to cloth extremities, minor expert restoration to spine head of Volume II. A near-fine copy.