Pierre Bouguer's Optical Treatise on the Gradation of Light. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by W. E. Knowles Middleton.

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English translation of Traité d'optique sur la gradation de la lumière (1st French ed., 1760). Frontispiece, xiv, 1 leaf, 248 pp; 48 figs.; 7 tables. Original cloth. Very Good, in very good dust jacket. Bookplate of Robert E. Schofield, who reviewed the book for Technology and Culture (Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring, 1962, pp. 183-184). 'In the latter part of the Essai [1729], Bouguer published the second of his great optical discoveries, often called Bouguer's law: In a medium of uniform transparency the light remaining in a collimated beam is an exponential function of the length of its path in the medium. This law was restated by J. H. Lambert in his Photometria (1760) and, perhaps because of the great rarity of copies of Bouguer's Essai, is sometimes unjustifiably referred to as Lambert's law. Just before he died, Bouguer completed a much larger book on photometry, the Traité d'optique sur la gradation de la lumière, published posthumously (1760) by his friend the Abbé Nicolas Louis de la Caille. The Traité goes far beyond the Essai, describing a number of ingenious kinds of photometers, including a method of goniophotometry, and even attempting an elaborate theory of the reflection of light from rough surfaces, although this was not successful. The third and last part of the book, however, gives a valid elementary theory of the horizontal visual range through an obscuring atmosphere, arriving at a law, usually credited to H. Koschmieder, considered to belong to the twentieth century. It is fair to consider Pierre Bouguer not only the inventor of the photometer but also the founder of an important branch of atmospheric optics. The eighteenth century is not an outstanding epoch in the history of optics, but Bouguer's contribution to that science is notable by any standard' (Middleton in D.S.B. II: 343-4; he notes a Latin translation appeared in 1762 and a Russin one in 1950). [441]. N° de ref. del artículo 17681

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