ISOTOPES - Francis William ASTON (1877-1945). Isotopes. [etc.]

ISOTOPES - Francis William ASTON (1877-1945).  Isotopes. London: Edward Arnold, 1922. 8vo (215 x 140mm). 4 half tone plates, illustrations and diagrams (some very light spotting). Original blue cloth gilt (extremities rubbed, without a dust-jacket [?as issued]). Provenance: A. B. [?]Gillett, 1922 (signature on front free endpaper). FIRST EDITION, published in the same year that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule" (DSB). Norman 77; PMM 412: "Once Aston had shown that the true atomic weight of an element is arrived at by averaging the mass of its constituent parts, and that there are seven isotopes of mercury and nine of xenon, the possibility that the atomic weights of elements would generally be whole numbers was finally abandoned. The reconstruction of the table of atomic weights by Aston's methods showed that they are only in exceptional cases whole numbers when considered as multiples of the weight of a hydrogen atom. The ultimate consequences of these discrepancies are far-reaching. The ratio between hydrogen and oxygen is not 4:1, as it 'should be', but rather less; which means that when four atoms of hydrogen are transformed into one helium atom some matter is annihilated. In fact this is an example of the interchangeability between mass and energy which is postulated in Einstein's 'General Theory of Relativity'." With the first German edition of the same work (Leipzig, 1923, [?]original cloth-backed boards) and Marie Curie's L' Isotope et les Elémens Isotopes (Paris, 1924, original cloth). Provenance: from the Collection of Peter and Margarethe Braune. (3)