FRANKLIN'S ELECTRICAL "NEMESIS": THE ABBÉ NOLLET'S 1760 LETTRES SUR ELECTRICITÉ, WITH FIVE LETTERS ADDRESSED TO AND CHALLENGING FRANKLIN, WITH EIGHT ENGRAVED FOLDING PLATES
(FRANKLIN, Benjamin) NOLLET, Jean-Antoine. Lettres sur l'Electricité. Paris: H.L. Guerin, & L.F. Delatour, 1760. 12mo, contemporary full marbled calf gilt, raised bands, red morocco spine label, marbled endpapers. $1750.
Third edition of Part I, first edition of Part II, of the Abbé Nollet's letters on electricity—five of which are addressed to Benjamin Franklin—with eight finely engraved folding plates, in handsome contemporary French calf-gilt.
"French Cartesians, above all the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet (soon to be Franklin's nemesis), insisted that explanations of electricity should stick to mechanical causes, not unseen forces. Nollet proposed that there was only one electrical substance but that it had two streams, outgoing ("effluent") and incoming ("affluent"), depending on the material that generated them" (Chaplin, The First Scientific American, 105). "The first menace [to Nollet's theory] was the Philadelphia theory of the Leyden jar, which unfortunately for Nollet had been discovered just after the system of effluence and affluence… Nollet, eager to retain the standard theory of electrical motions, insisted on transparency and mechanical action… Nollet recognized these menaces and replied in an amusing set of Lettres sur l'electricité (1753), containing a wealth of counterexamples which drew their strength from Franklin's occasional obscurities, imprecisions, exaggerations and inappropriate appeals to traditional effluvial models… [Nollet's] tireless ingenuity, expressed in seven memoirs and two more volumes of Lettres, kept the Academy bamboozled until his death in 1770" (DSB). "Nouvelle edition" (third edition) of Part I, first published in 1753; this is the first appearance of Part II. A third part was added to the Lettres in 1767. Text in French. DSB X, 147. Engraved armorial bookplate of the Albert Louis, Comte de Schulenburg, descendant of renowned German general and art collector Marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1741). Old Metz bookseller label.
Interior clean and fine; attractive contemporary French calf-gilt binding with some restoration to boards and joints. A lovely, near-fine copy with a nice provenance.