8vo (172 x 107mm). With advertisement leaf at end. (Lacking half-title and final text leaf containing most of Barbot’s letter, some uppers trimmed close, with some pagination just shaved, occasional soiling or spotting; one ink numerical stamp on a lower margin of a prelim and a few library markings in pencil.) Late-18th or early-19th century vellum gilt (soiled, recased in the 19th-century with blank wove paper leaves at ends, bookplates partially removed from both pastedowns). Provenance: Stokes (early trial signatures on final leaf); Josiah Latimer Clark, English electrical engineer (gilt name stamp on spine and ink stamp on title and a text margin with his Westminster Chambers address); Schuyler Skaats Wheeler (partially effaced bookplate, according to NYPL, the copy was previously released). 

FIRST EDITION of “the earliest English work entirely on electricity, with the exception of a tract published by Boyle as part of a collection in 1675” (Honeyman).

Jean Théophile Desaguliers was born in La Rochelle, but moved with his family as boy to England where he was raised and educated. He became a natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer and freemason who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Isaac Newton. He had studied at Oxford and later popularized Newtonian theories and their practical applications in public lectures. As President of the Royal Society, Newton invited Desaguliers to replace Francis Hauksbee as demonstrator at the Society's weekly meetings in 1714; he was soon thereafter made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Desaguliers promoted Newton's ideas and maintained the scientific nature of the meetings when Hans Sloane took over the Presidency after Newton died in 1727. Desaguliers contributed over 60 articles to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. VERY RARE.

ESTC T34640; Honeyman sale 853; Wheeler Gift 306.