when David DiLaura bought a copy of Optics Little did an antique book dealer in Sussex know that they were exchanging a few dollars for a volume that was actually worth hundreds of thousands. DiLaura himself was procuring a manual used personally by Isaac Newton.
Recently DiLaura, who apart from being a book collector He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, He was reviewing his bibliography on Newton when he noticed that the inside label stating that the book was one belonged to Sir James Musgrave on the other. Tracing the Name, DiLaura and the Rare Book Specialist Carefully pom harrington He learned that the book was nothing less than a copy of the Opticks which had been believed to be lost for centuries. its value when sold It could top $375,000 at the next San Francisco Book Fair.
Optics is the work of Isaac Newton in which the famous physicist wrote down his discoveries regarding the refraction of light. Newton built a camera obscura and managed to demonstrate through glass prisms that light refracts into different colors of light and these recombine to give white light again. The manual also details the steps for building a practical refracting telescope.
Newton is known to have owned two copies of the second edition of Opticks, both published in 1717. One of the copies, the only one known, was used by Newton in his own research and is full of Newton’s annotations. the second, completely ancient, which until now was considered lost.
Isaac Newton died in 1727 and his books were sold to John Huggins, who bought them as a gift to his son Charles, then Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The editions prevented his successor, Dr. James Musgrave, from continuing in this family of scholars for generations. [vía Ars Technica]
