Description
A series of four Autograph Letters Signed, thanking his correspondent for the “offer of the use of the Bolton & Watts engine”, referring to the performance of Mr Fairbairn’s double acting Engine, asking about “the Water-load raised by the engine”, with much else of a technical nature referring to engines, pressure, instrument adjustment, etc. 4 letters, 13 pp. in good condition. Wandsworth, c.1841 Henry Moseley (1801-1872), mathematician and scientist. Among his main works was The Mechanical Principles of Engineering and Architecture (London, 1843, 2nd edit. 1855). It was reprinted in America with notes by Dennis Hart Mahan for the use at West Point. Formulas published by Moseley became standard for calculations of the dynamical stability of warships. This work first appeared in a memoir On the Dynamical Stability and on the Oscillations of Floating Bodies, read before the Royal Society, and published in Philosophical Transactions in 1850. “My object in placing my indicator on your engine is to adjust it, as I would my watch by a chronometer, or my scales by a standard balance” and Moseley expects to be able “to measure out power by it as truly as time can be measured by one of these and weight by the other.”