Traité des télégraphes et essai d'un nouvel établissement de ce genre

Three works bound in one volume, comprising one first French translation and two first editions.

Half fawn calf, paste-paper boards, green corners, smooth spine decorated with six gilt bands and three blind-stamped tools, two titles stamped on the spine (that of the Mémoire sur l'université is not present), speckled edges. Some rubbing and soiling to the binding, light foxing.

A curious gathering of two scientific texts, one devoted to the telegraph and the other to optical instruments, together with a polemical pamphlet by the founder of the Collège Stanislas.

In his Treatise on Telegraphs, first published in Swedish in 1796, the poet and academician Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz set out his research on the optical telegraph. Developed by the Frenchman Claude Chappe from 1791 onwards, the optical telegraph is the forerunner of the electric telegraph, which would be invented more than thirty years later. As its name suggests, it relied entirely on the visual observation of signals. These were formed by operators by means of articulated arms mounted at the top of towers some ten kilometres apart; observed through a spyglass, the coded signals were reproduced in order to be relayed to the next station. Having learned of Chappe's work, Edelcrantz devised as early as 1794 an optical telegraph of a different kind: he replaced the articulated arms with ten iron shutters, open or closed, whose combinations yielded 1,024 signals corresponding to a code of letters, words and phrases. He also proposed a solution for using the telegraph at night by lighting it with lamps, a possibility of which Chappe's system did not make regular use. Thanks to Edelcrantz, Sweden became one of the first countries, after France, to equip itself with a telegraph network. This 1801 edition, accompanied by one table and four folding diagrams, gives the French translation of the treatise - its first translation into a foreign language, preceding the German one of 1802.

The operation of Edelcrantz's telegraph depended to a large extent on optical instruments, which made it possible to observe the signals at a distance of several kilometres. Bound in the same volume, the 1821 Catalogue général des objets de sciences et arts by Jean Gabriel Augustin Chevallier is devoted precisely to these instruments. This optician, whose name survives today in the firm "L'Ingénieur Chevallier", enjoyed in his day the renown of optician to the King and the royal family. At 1, quai de l'Horloge he sold all sorts of optical apparatus of his own making: microscopes, telescopes, magnifying glasses, spectacles, monocles, pince-nez, camerae obscurae intended "to draw and paint in miniature", as well as achromatic glasses, that is to say spyglasses. 

Curiously, a work of an altogether different nature is bound between the two texts devoted to instruments. Published anonymously in 1814, the Mémoire sur l'université is a polemical pamphlet directed against the Imperial University, written by Abbé Liautard, who in 1804 founded the Institution Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which became the Collège Stanislas in 1822. In 1808 the Imperial University secured a monopoly on education, required private establishments to send their pupils to attend classes at the lycées and subjected them to a twofold fiscal burden. Liautard, a priest who had himself received a brilliant education, notably at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, had long evaded the obligation to send his pupils to the Lycée Napoléon. In this memoir, whose publication coincided with the fall of the First Empire, Liautard castigated "this colossal University, wanton daughter of irreligion, despotism and taxation" and did not temper his vehemence where the former Emperor was concerned:

"Of all Buonaparte's conceptions, the most frightening to the thinking man, the most profoundly anti-social, in a word the most worthy of him, I do not hesitate to say it, is the University. When the tyrant believed he had secured, by so many horrible laws, the misery of the present generation, he raised this monstrous edifice as a monument to his hatred for the generations to come, and seemed to wish to rob mankind of hope itself."

An unusual composite volume of three works from the first quarter of the 19th century, by the Swedish inventor of an optical shutter telegraph, the polemicist abbé who founded the Collège Stanislas, and the optician to the King whose firm still exists in Paris.