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Carl Friedrich Gauss, "Mesure absolute de l'Intensité du Magnétisme terrestre" in Annales de Chimie et de Physique; Paris, by Crochard, 1834, vol 57, pp. 5-69 in the volume of 448pp. Beautifully rebound in half-calf and marbled boards, with new endpaper; very usable, quite a lovely job. The only demerit here is an old cellophane tape repair on the title page. Fine copy. __+__ Also bound with: Amedeo Avogadro, "Nouvelles Recherches sur la Chaleur spécifique des Corps solides et liquides" , same volume, pp.113-148, in which Avogadro extends the law of Dulong and Petit. (Elsewhere on ABE this store offers the Dulong/Petit paper as part of another vol of the Annales de Chimie, thi sheadlined by Augustin Fresnel and François Arago, 1819.)__+__ The new magnetic observatory, free of all metal that might affect magnetic forces, was part of a network that Humboldt hoped would make coordinated measurements of geographical and temporal variations. In 1834 there were already twenty-three magnetic observatories in Europe, and the comparison of data from them showed the existence of magnetic storms. Gauss and Weber organized the Magnetische Verein, which united a worldwide network of observatories. Its Resultate aus den Beobachtungen des magnetischen Vereins appeared in six volumes (1836 1841) and included fifteen papers by Gauss, twenty-three by Weber, and the joint Atlas des Erdmagnetismus (1840). These and other publications elsewhere dealt with problems of instrumentation (including one of several inventions of the bifilar magnetometer), reported observations of the horizontal and vertical components of magnetic force, and attempted to explain the observations in mathematical terms.__+__ The most important publication in the last category was the Allgemeine Theorie des Erdmagnetismus (1839). Here Gauss broke the tradition of armchair theorizing about the earth as a fairly neutral carrier of one or more magnets and based his mathematics on data. Using ideas first considered by him in 1806, well formulated by 1822, but lacking empirical foundation until 1838, Gauss expressed the magnetic potential at any point on the earth s surface by an infinite series of spherical functions and used the data collected by the world network to evaluate the first twenty-four coefficients. This was a superb interpolation, but Gauss hoped later to explain the results by a physical theory about the magnetic composition of the earth. --Complete Dictionary Scientific Biography online.
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