“The First Report from what we would now call a Research Laboratory” (Middleton)
With 75 Engravings of Laboratory Instruments including Descriptions of Glass Manufacture

[ACCADEMIA DEL CIMENTO].

MAGALOTTI, Lorenzo.

Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell'Accademia del Cimento.

Florence, Giovanni Filippo Cecchi, 1691.

Folio (35.7 x 24.8 cm), [9] ff., including half-title, title, portrait of Ferdinando de Medici II, 269 pp., [10] ff., 1 blank, including 75 (26 full-page) illustrations. Bound in contemporary blind-stamped Italian calf over boards, rebacked; boards restored where abraded. Internally fine. Housed in a modern linen clamshell box.

Second edition, a virtual reprint of the first and an internally superb copy of this classic in experimental science, giving important accounts of experiments conducted by among others Torricelli in the Accademia del Cimento — “the first report from what we would now call a research laboratory” (Middleton)—including experiments in making precision glass instruments.

The experimenters were critically interested in improving the technology of measurement, first evident in the present work in engravings of a barometer, air thermometer and “Florentine” or alcohol thermometers. As many of these were created specifically for the Accademia’s experiments, Magalotti provides detailed descriptions not only of the experiments but also of the creation of the glass instruments themselves, including descriptions of the glass-blowing (led by Ferdinand’s chief glass-blower Moriani), the division of the glass tubes with black or white glass ‘pearls,’ and the creation of a spiral thermometer to obtain finer degrees of precision. Many of the scientific instruments employed by the Society are extant, preserved at the Science Museum in Florence.

Prominent among the experimenter’s additional interests were air pressure, the speed of sound, radiant heat and phosphorescence, and the discovery of the plane of oscillation of a pendulum. The Accademia was founded in 1657 by two of Galileo’s most eminent pupils, Evangelista Torricelli and Vincenzo Galliani, in order to defend and extend the tradition of empirical inquiry and improved technology initiated by their maître. Other researchers associated with the Accademia include Borelli, Redi and Viviani.

The Accademia was the inspiration for most learned societies, including the Royal Society, as is clear from contemporary correspondence (see Middleton, p. 287), and for a time the two institutions attempted some collaborations. The reports were “filed” by Lorenzo Magalotti, the society secretary. An English translation was prepared under the auspices of the Royal Society by Richard Waller, Essayes of Natural Experiments Made in the Academie del Cimento (London 1684).

* Riccardi I.407; Gamba 853; Piantanida 1663; Graesse 335; Dibner 82; W.E. Knowles Middleton, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia del Cimento (1971), no. 2 in Appendix A and passim.

Price: $3,950.00