Experiments and Observations on Electricity

The census claim is correct, and the counter-intuitive fact is precisely the point worth publishing: the most important scientific book of eighteenth-century America (Printing and the Mind of Man) has a London first edition and no American first at all. Franklin's letters went to Peter Collinson, who communicated them to the Royal Society; Edward Cave of the Gentleman's Magazine printed them at St. John's Gate. No Philadelphia printing precedes or parallels the 1751 London edition. As collected, the complete first edition is the 1751 Part I together with the two supplements Cave issued to extend it — 'Supplemental Experiments and Observations' (1753, 20 pp.) and 'New Experiments and Observations', Part III (1754, 44 pp.). PMM 199 cites the first edition in three parts, 1751–54, so a 1751 Part I standing alone is the first edition of Part I but not the complete first edition as the reference literature defines it.