70

Gemma Frisius (1508-1555)

De Radio Astronomico & Geometrico Liber.

Paris: Apud Guilelmum Cavellat, 1557.
Octavo, second edition; illustrated throughout with fine woodcut diagrams; the Macclesfield copy, with bookplate and blind stamps (when sold in 2004 this title was bound with other short works which were separated); bound in full 18th century speckled calf with gilt ruling, rebacked; last leaf with large printer's mark on verso; two pages that would have been cropped when this book was rebound are folded vertically to preserve margins; 6 x 3 3/4 in.

"Gemma's version [of the cross-staff or radius] could be used by the relatively untutored as a hand-held astronomer's staff, as a surveyor's staff, or as a navigator's staff. In surveying it could measure heights of buildings with no calculation and serve in a triangulation survey. The cross-staff brought back by [John] Dee from Louvain in 1574 is the earliest example so far discovered of such an actual instrument in England. An example of this type of staff, made in 1571 by Gemma's nephew Walter Arsenius, is in the British Museum." (Quoted from Oxford Figures, ed. John Favel, Raymond Flood & Robin Wilson, Oxford University, 2013.)

Tycho Brahe also used a radius made by Frisius's nephew for his astronomical observations. "In Gemma's exhaustive treatise on the astronomical radius, the crossbar was moved along the staff until the angle to be measured was exactly covered by the length of the bar. In Tycho's model, the crossbar was equipped with one movable sight. When the observer had adjusted the bar on the staff so that he could see his two stars along the lines of sight running from the end of the staff through each sight on the crossbar, he could obtain the tangent of their angle of separation by reading the scales etched on the bar and staff." (Quoted from Victor E. Thoren's The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe, Cambridge University Press, 2002.)

  • Notes: Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
  • Condition: a-l8.

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