4to (220 x 170 mm), with four folding engraved plates; lightly browned and foxed; a good copy in contemporary calf, rebacked retaining original spine. £5750
First edition of this ‘landmark in the history of mechanics’, containing the enunciation of what is now known as d'Alembert's principle. This is the method of reducing the laws of the motion of bodies to situations of static equilibrium as a technique for dynamic analysis (‘the internal forces of inertia must be equal and opposite to the forces that produce the acceleration’). It is based on the three laws of motion that d'Alembert presents earlier in this work, the law of inertia, the parallelogram of motion, and the law of equilibrium and the conservation of momentum; ‘he actually assumed the conservation of momentum and defined mass accordingly. This fact was what made his work a mathematical physics rather than simply mathematics’ (DSB).
This work was the foundation for Lagrange's classic book on analytical mechanics which codified the laws governing the motions of any systems of bodies.
D'Alembert is also credited with laying to rest, in the Traité, the vis viva controversy by investigating its philosophical basis and dismissing its ontological reality. ‘In this way d'Alembert was clearly a precursor of positivistic science’ (ibid).
D'Alembert was the scientific editor of the Encyclopédie, and his preface to the Traité de dynamique sets out his philosophy of science and his recognition of the conceptual revolution catalysed by Newton.
En Français dans le texte 147; Norman 31; Parkinson p 159; PMM 195; Roberts and Trent p 7; Roller and Goodman I p 26
GBP 5750.00
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