FARADAY, Michael (1791-1867). Experimental Researches in Electricity. [etc.]

FARADAY, Michael (1791-1867).  Experimental Researches in Electricity. London: [Vols. one & 2:] Richard and John Edward Taylor; [Vol. III:] Richard Taylor and William Francis, [1839]-44-55. 3 volumes, large 8vo (222 x 142mm). 17 engraved plates, most folding, diagrams and tables, 8-pages of publisher’s advertisements dated May 13, 1839 at the end of vol. one (heavy stain to one plate in vol. III, occasional light mainly marginal spotting and staining, some leaves lightly browned). Original near-uniform green publisher’s cloth, spines lettered in gilt (corners bumped, some light staining). Provenance: J. B. [?]Gill (old signature on title of first vol.); F. Buddle Atkinson (armorial bookplate in vol. II). FIRST EDITION IN BOOK FORM of the twenty-nine series of papers published by Faraday in Philosophical Transactions between 1832 and 1852. Dibner Heralds 64; Horblit 29; Jeffreys 297; Norman 762; PMM 308: “… Although [Faraday’s] discovery of the electric motor and the dynamo was almost entirely incidental to his theoretical discoveries, it laid the foundation of the modern electrical industry – electric light and power, telephony, wireless telegraphy, television, etc. by providing for the production of continuous mechanical motion from an electrical source, and vice versa … [He] coined a whole new terminology – electrolyte, electrolyze, cathode, anode and ion. Helmholtz, in the Faraday Lecture for 1881, pointed out that Faraday had trembled on the brink of discovering the electron theory of matter”; Wheeler Gift 959. With the same author’s Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (London, 1859, original cloth, FIRST EDITION). Provenance: from the Collection of Peter and Margarethe Braune. (4)