Description

Two volumes. First Edition Volume One & Reprint of Volume Two. With 15 folding plates, and a supplementary text by A. Quetelet. 8vo, recent cloth with paper spine labels. Some minor spotting, but a lovely copy in attractive binding.

Edizione: herschel's important treatise on light. with sections on photometry, refraction, the construction of the eye and lenses, achromatic telescopes, diffraction of light, colors, etc. sir john herschel was a scientist and astronomer like his father, sir william herschel. in 1809 he entered the university of cambridge; in 1812 he submitted his first mathematical paper to the royal society, of which he was elected a fellow the following year. an accomplished chemist, herschel also discovered the action of hyposulfite of soda on otherwise insoluble silver salts in 1819, which led to the use of "hypo" as a fixing agent in photography. in 1839, independently of william henry fox talbot, herschel also invented a photographic process using sensitized paper. it was herschel who coined the use of the terms photography, positive, and negative to refer to photographic images.