Octavo. xvi + 258pp, 6 folding engraved plates. (Simson, 253 + (3)pp, 14 folding engraved plates). Contemporary straight-grained morocco, rubbed. Overall, a very good copy of an exceptionally scarce work. Skempton No.60. Not in Bibliotheca Mechanica, though later editions are. Peter Barlow was one of the key figures in the development of engineering science and his "Essay..." was the first major British work on the strength of materials. It became the standard work for engineers for over half a century, going into six more editions, each one expanded, corrected and enlarged to keep pace with new findings. However, while the later editions, as might be expected, are relatively common, this first edition is exceptionally rare. It gives a picture of the state of knowledge of this crucial subject at the dawn of the railway age just before cast and wrought iron came to dominate the engineering world.. Thus the central core of the work is devoted to timber. Barlow gives an account of the great scientific studies into the behaviour of beams and columns of Galileo, Leibnitz, Parent, Bernouilli, Euler, Girard and so on before discussing his own experiments, carried out on a testing machine of his own design at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy. He measured deflections of oak, ash, fir and beech, some fixed at each end and some fixed only at one end. However, the book is also a herald of the future for Barlow's testing machine, described and illustrated within the book, attracted the attention of Thomas Telford, then designing an immense suspension bridge to cross the Mersey at Runcorn. Telford made available to Barlow his tests to determine the strength of iron wire and wrought-iron bars for cables and chains. Although the Runcorn Bridge was never built, the experiments provided Telford with the information to design his Menai Bridge, for which Barlow was to carry out a series of experiments. These studies into the strength of iron, published here for the first time, laid the foundation for further work into a material which predominated the railway age and upon which the later editions of Barlow's pioneering book focussed.The book is bound in pleasant, near contemporary, straight-grained morocco with Simson's Conic Sections, which it seemed better to preserve than to split the two and rebind each in a modern replica binding.
GBP 550.00
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