GAUGER, Nicolas (c. 1680-1730); John Theophilus DE...

Fires improv'd : being a new method of building chimneys, so as to prevent their smoaking: in which a small fire, shall warm a room better than a much larger made the common way. With the manner of altering such chimneys as are already built, so that they shall perform the same effects. ... Made English and improved, by J. T. Desaguliers, M.A. F.R.S.. By whom is added the manner of making coal-fires, as useful this new-way, as the wood-fires propos'd by the French Author, explain'd by an additional plate. The whole being suited to the capacity of the meanest work-man

London: printed for J. Senex at the Globe in Salisbury Court, and E. Curll, at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet-Street, 1715.
12mo in half sheets: [pi]1--3 A--O8 P2, 89 leaves, pp. [6] vi 7--161 [11]. Errata on [pi]3v, Curll's advertisements on last leaf. Typographic headpieces, wood or metal-cut initials and tailpieces. Plates: 9 engraved plates: numbered Plate I--IX (bound at the end as foldouts). Leaf size and condition: 154 x 89mm. Binding: Contemporary unlettered polished calf, blind tooled sides with double filet borders and a row of gouges against the spine, manuscript fore-edge label. Ink stain on upper cover, joints cracked but sound. Provenance and annotation: Signature 'Wm Danby' on pastedown (possibly William Danby, 1752--1833, the builder of Swinton Park in Yorkshire); nineteenth-century booklabel of E. W. Kirk, Nottingham. References: ESTC t112501; Harris 244.
First edition in English, a translation of Le mecanique du feu (Paris, 1713). 'Price 3s' on title.
§ A most attractive copy of a work which prepared the way for Franklin's and Rumford's applications of science to domestic comfort. The 'Advertisement' on A1 Desaguliers directs readers to two builders in London, Henry Hathwel and William Vream, as the best workmen he knows for curing smoking chimneys. <<Gauger's Méchanique du Feu, published in Paris in 1713, is the earliest treatise on domestic heating and the basis of all eighteenth-century books on the subject in English... In the summer of 1715 the well-known experimental philosopher Jean Theophilus Desaguliers published a translation of Gauger's book, omitting what he thought superfluous and adding his own improvements to suit the burning of coal in England. >>Harris.

• GBP 950.00 > autres monnaies
• Commande nro.: 17015

• libraire: Roger Gaskell (GREAT BRITAIN)