Milestones of Science Books

FOURIER, Jean Baptiste Joseph.

Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires / Résume théorique des propriétés de la chaleur rayonnante. In: Annales de Chimie et de Physique, Ser. 2, vol. 27, pp. 136-67 and 236-81.

Paris: Crochard, 1824.

1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Item #003753

8vo (200 x 122 mm). Entire volume: 448 pp., including half title, general title, 1 engraved plate. Contemporary half calf over marbled boards, spine with gilt decoration, gilt-lettered labels and additional printed and hand-lettered paper label, brown sprinkled edges, original light-blue endpapers (leather and extremities rubbed, minor wear to corners). Little age-toning and minor occasional spotting. Provenance: Lycee Faidherbe de Lille (title and some text pages with old library stamp, shelf mark in manuscript to title). ----

FIRST EDITION of two milestone papers by Fourier relating to the Greenhouse Effect. "In October 1824, Fourier published a scientific paper titled 'Remarques generales sur les Temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires' in the journal Annales de Chimie et de Physique, Tome XXVII (pp. 136-167), in which he presented his results from a mathematical analysis, that climate-change experts today [. . .] generally regard as the start of climate-change science. Fourier stumbled across the greenhouse effect when he puzzled over this particularly tantalizing question: Every day the Sun's rays strike the Earth's surface and warm it up, so why doesn't the planet keep heating up until it is as hot as the Sun itself? His answer was that the heated surface must emit invisible infrared radiation, which carries the heat energy away into space. But when he calculated the effect mathematically, he got a temperature well below freezing, much colder than the actual Earth. The difference, he suggested, must be due to the Earth's atmosphere. Somehow it kept part of the heat radiation in. He tried to explain this by comparing way Earth's atmosphere holds in heat from the Sun to the way the glass of a greenhouse keeps in the heat. He actually wrote about a glass box rather than a greenhouse, but the name "greenhouse effect" for the effect he described was coined soon afterwards. Fourier did not set out to think about climate change as such. Rather he was investigating the purely scientific question of what determines the average temperature of a planet like the Earth? This was the sort of question that physicists were just beginning to learn how to attack back in the early 19th century. To understand heat transfer, Fourier invented the powerful mathematical techniques he is best known for to mathematicians today - techniques that turned out to have many applications besides heat flow, in particular, forming the basis of modern music synthesizers and MP3 players" (Devlin Angle, The Other Thing Fourier Did, Nov. 2010, online resource) - Visit our website to see more images!

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