122. 122W A Louis XV brass and iron-mounted, giltwood, tulipwood and glass single cylinder, stirrup pneumatic machine -or air pump- after the model of Jean-Antoine Nollet, third quarter 18th century The three curved legs, carved with open work foliate and garland decoration, supporting a triangular cage mounted around the pump tube containing a piston attached to a stirrup fitted with an ascendant handle. Above this tube is a key handle decorated with leaves and a rosette, and surmounted by a plate carried on three curved and decorated arms. This plate, originally covered with leather, provides the support for the bell-jar. Behind this assembly is a large carved wheel with a crank handle, between a pair of uprights fitted with four pulleys and wing-nut adjustments ending a gantry which is hinged so as to release the bell jar. The wheel and pulley arrangement allows objects placed in the bell-jar to be rotated at any desired speed, 60cm wide, 52cm deep, 164cm high (23 1/2in wide, 20in deep, 64 1/2in high). Provenance Bernard Dillée, Paris (1905-1976), thence by descent Didier Aaron, Paris (1923-2009) Hervé Aaron, Paris 2011 Private European Collection Literature J.-A. Nollet, 'Mémoire sur les instruments qui sont propres aux expériences de l'air', Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, année MDCCXL, avec les mémoires de Mathématique et physique pour la même année, Paris 1742, 385-432. J.-A. Nollet, 'Sur les instruments qui sont propres aux expériences de l'air. Troisième partie', Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, année MDCCXL, avec les mémoires de Mathématique et physique pour la même année, Paris 1742, 567-85. J.-A. Nollet, 'Mémoire sur les instruments qui sont propres aux expériences de l'air', Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, année MDCCXLI, avec les mémoires de Mathématique et physique pour la même année, Paris 1744, 338-62. J.-A. Nollet, Leçons de physique, 6 vols Paris 1743 -1764, iii 185-216. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Catalogue officiel des collections, ii Physique, Paris 1905, 40 Lewis Pyenson & Jean-François Gauvin (eds), The Art of teaching physics: the eighteenth century demonstration apparatus of Jean-Antoine Nollet, 1700-1770, Sillery 2002. Related examples, with or without the wheel and pulley arrangement and with some other minor variations, of Nollet's improved air pump are conserved in: Musée des Arts & Métiers, Paris. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge (Ma), USA. Château de Chenonceau, Loire, in the cabinet of physics apparatus. Museo Galileo, Florence. Our pneumatic vacuum machine is similar to that at Florence (dated to c.1780) with related giltwood decoration, opposed to japanned decoration as in the other known models. Nollet developed his pump version in the late 1730s. He described and showed it to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1740, and the three memoirs he wrote to explain it were published in their entirety. Later he described it in his Leçons de physique expérimentale with an explanation of its uses and an account of the phenomena that it rendered accessible to explanation. We would like to thank Anthony Turner for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.