Milestones of Science Books

GRIGNON, Pierre-Clément.

L'Art de fabriquer le fer, de fondre et de forger des pièces d'artillerie.

Paris: Delalain, 1807.

2nd Edition. Hardcover. Fine. Item #001797

4to (256x200 mm), xxxvii, (3) 654, (2) pp., marbled endpapers, half title, title with small vignette, 13 engraved folding plates. Contemporary full calf with morocco label and gilt-tooled spine (boards, hinges and extremities rubbed), interior bright and virtually unfoxed. A fine and copy of an extraordinarily rare work, important in the history of metallurgy and iron mineralogy. ----

Exeedingly rare second edition, much rarer than the first edition (only one copy listed in Worldcat: Ecole des Mines, Paris). In 1775 Pierre Grignon published a book on various aspects of iron mineralogy and metallurgy which is of considerable importance to the history of metallurgy and crystallography. Grignon was occupied in the commerical operation of a blast furnace and forge plant and his science stemmed from observations on a much larger scale than those of his laboratry contemporaries. He had the opportunity to see large crystals in shrinkage heads of large castings. The first memoir of structural interest « Mémoire sur les métamorphoses du fer » had been read before the French Academy in 1761, but was not published until 1775. Here, he provides a model of crystal structure which is qualitatively the same as that used by Romé de l'Isle in 1772, by Tobern Bergman in 1773, and particularly by the great Haüy in 1784, and it is not improbable that Grignon's ideas, public but unpublished, provided the stimulus for the mathematical approach of these more famous crystallographers. Although the possibility of solid solutions as a mixed aggregate is implicit in the ideas of many of the corpuscular philosophers, it is Grignon who first describes a crystallographic model of a mixed crystal (Smith, History of Metallography, pp. 132-136). The 1807 edition is an exact reprint of the first edition with identical page numbering. ---- Seconde Edition, extrement rare (un seul exemplaire répertorié dans WorldCat à Ecole des Mines, Paris). Pierre-Clément Grignon (1723 -1784), savant métallurgiste, maitre de forge, correspondant de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, dirigeat les forges de Bayard près de Saint-Dizier. Ami de Buffon, il se livra à divers expériences sur le fer et s'efforça de trouver une méthode pour fondre une meilleure qualité de ce minerai. La fonte des canons représentant une activité de la forge de Bayard, Grignon expérimenta pour leur fabrication une nouvelle matière, la régule de fer ; il participa activement à la rédaction de la section Forges ou l'Art du fer de l'Encyclopédie. Il réuni l'ensemble de ses travaux dans cet ouvrage orné de 13 planches gravées dépliantes.

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