Elettricismo artificiale di Giambatista Beccaria: delle Scuole Pie All'Altezza Reale del Signor Duca di Chablais

Torino: Nella Stamperia Reale, 1772. Very Good. Quarto (23 cm); viii, 417 pages, and XI folding copper-engraved plates. Bound "alla rustica" in publisher's pastepaper, lettered in manuscript on spine. Pages evenly toned, but an unblemished, unsophisticated copy of a seminal work.

References: Gamba, 2150 ("Nella Fisica forma epoca il nome di Beccaria"); La Stampa Reale di Torino, p. 71;

Second much-expanded and first illustrated edition of the seminal study of electricity by Giovanni Battista Beccaria, professor of experimental physics at the University of Torino. (The edition published in 1753, without plates, was about half the pages.) It was this edition that Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley brought to John Nourse, noted London publisher of scientific books, to have translated into English and published in 1776 as "A treatise upon artificial electricity.

Beccaria (1716-1781) was a principal exponent of Franklin's studies on electricity in Europe, and a principal innovator in Italian experimental science. Indeed, upon reading the earlier copy of Beccaria's book, Franklin noted in a letter to Cadwallader Colden that "he (Beccaria) seems a Master of Method, and has reduc’d to systematic Order the scatter’d Experiments and Positions deliver’d in my Papers." Franklin and Beccaria wrote to each other frequently (Beccaria sometimes writing in Latin, which had to be translated for Franklin), and remained keen on each other's work, although they never met face to face. Priestly (in his "History and Present State of Electricity") declared Beccaria " the "great Italian genius" who had "far surpassed everything done by French and English electricians."

This 1772 edition, sent to press at the Royal Printers of Turin, includes a dedicatory letter to Franklin, not present in the earlier version.