Partners in Science: Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black

Robinson, Eric and McKie, Douglas (Edited, with Introductions and Notes by)

ISBN 10: 0094516405 / ISBN 13: 9780094516403

Published by Constable & Co, London, 1970

About this Item

xvi, 502 pages, index. Cloth boards, flecked at and by the edges in worn dust-jacket which has a closed tear, affecting the front cover illustration, and some loss by the spine head. The [edited] scientific correspondence of Watt, Black, Robinson and others, together with James Watt's notebook of experiments on heat. Size: 8vo.

Seller Inventory # 024494

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Partners in Science: Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black
• Publisher: Constable & Co, London
• Publication Date: 1970
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0094516405
• ISBN 13: 9780094516403
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science, Technical & Mathematics

About this title

Synopsis

The scientific correspondence of Watt, Black, Robison and others, together with James Watt's notebook of experiments on heat, edited by Eric Robinson and Douglas McKie.

The close friendship that grew up between Dr. Joseph Black, the discoverer of specific and latent heats, and James Watt, the scientific instrument maker who was destined to become perhaps the greatest engineer of all time, is in itself a dramatic relationship, not before fully appreciated, Here for the first time is the full text of all their surviving correspondence, known only fragmentarily before in J. P. Muirhead's Life and Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, and there rather freely amended by the editor.

The amazing range of Watt's interests--in the firing of delft and stoneware, the manufacture of alkali from salt, the invention of scientific instruments as well as the copying press, and many other matters beside the steam-engine--is revealed here. Watt's own position as a scientist and the quality of his association with Black in further experiments on latent heat are fully documented. But the correspondence is also valuable for the light it sheds on many aspects of life in Britain in the later half of the eighteenth century.

In addition, Watt's notebook on his experiments on heat, known before only through quotation, is presented complete. This is a primary source of first-rate importance to the historian of science.