Of considerable importance to the history of metallurgy and crystallography

GRIGNON, Pierre-Clément.

Memoires de Physique sur l'Art de fabriquer le fer, d'en fondre & forger des canons d'artillerie; sur l'histoire naturelle, et sur divers suites particuliers de physique et d'economie.

Paris: Delalain, 1775.

1st Edition. Hardcover. 4to - over 9¾ - 12" tall. Near Fine. Item #001978

4to (255x198 mm), xxxvii, [3], 654, [2] pp., including half title and 13 engraved plates. Contemporary full calf with richly decorated gilt-tooled spine, marbled edges and endpapers. Some worming to boards, little wear to extremities. Internally little browned, occasional minor spotting. An outstanding copy of a milestone work in metallurgy. ----

Exceedingly rare first edition. Smith, History of Metallography, pp. 132-136: In 1775 Pierre Grignon published the present 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Bergman in 1773, and particularly by the great Haüy in 1784, and it is not improbable that Grignon's ideas, public but unpublished, provided the stimulus for the mathematical approach of these more famous crystallographers.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. -
Edition originale. 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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