Talk:Experimental researches in electricity

1839 preface by Faraday
The version at has a preface by Michael Faraday that he signed on March, 1839, and does not have Tyndall's 1869 introduction, as this does. Should our Wikisource version have just the Tyndall introduction? Or Faraday's (original) preface as well? —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 03:13, 5 February 2008 (UTC)


 * With the proper notes attached, I see no problem in providing Faraday's preface alongside the text of the scanned 1869 edition. Ideally, we would have scanned pages for both editions, but Project Gutenberg is considered a trustworthy source.--GrafZahl (talk) 10:53, 5 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Great, I'm glad to hear it. I'll include the original preface. (Some would dispute that PG is a trustworthy source, by the way, but I would strongly argue that Distributed Proofreaders is a trustworthy source, and this text on PG was proofed by DP.) —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 11:08, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, there are some very significant differences between the 1869 version we have pagescans of, and the 1849 version that Gutenberg has. Here's a list, so far as I can tell, of the correspondences and differences. (Note that Gutenberg only has Volume 1 of 2.)

So what do we do? It seems that the 1869 edition is a abridged version of both volumes, but we only have volume 1 of the original, and the numbering is different. In addition, both versions include illustrations, but the 1869 version has some illustrations (e.g. Page:Experimental_researches_in_electricity_025.jpg) that the 1849 one does not. What a mess. —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 12:20, 5 February 2008 (UTC)


 * One of the main goals of Wikisource is completeness. If the 1869 edition is truly inferior (except for the illustrations) to the 1849 edition in this respect we should probably get our hands on the 1849 edition and provide that.
 * A more fundamental question: should we create Wikisource editions with material from more than one printed edition for the sake of greater completeness?
 * Many of these things probably lie in the hands of the person who finally gets some real work done with these works. I've tried to get things going with A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism but not too much has come of it, for lack of time on my part.--GrafZahl (talk) 14:40, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

The first publics in philsophical transactions are not all available from google. --enomil (talk) 14:25, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Volume 1 (1839):
 * Volume 2 (1844):
 * Volume 3 (1855):