Carl Anderson: The Positive Electron, the discovery of the positron

The discovery of the positron,
the first known particle of antimatter,
first printing in original wrappers

Carl Anderson: The Positive Electron

"On August 2, 1932, during the course of photographing cosmic-ray tracks produced in a vertical WIlson chamber (magnetic field of 15,000 gauss) designed in the summer of 1930 by Professor R. A. Millikan and the writer, the tracks shown in Fig. 1 were obtained, which seemed to be interpretable only on the basis of the existence in this case of a particle carrying a positive charge but having a mass of the same order of magnitude as that normally possessed by a free negative electron.

...It is concluded, therefore, that the magnitude of
the charge of the positive electron which we shall
henceforth contract to positron is very probably equal to that of a free negative electron which from symmetry considerations would naturally be called a negatron." -Carl Anderson

ANDERSON, Carl. "The Positive Electron", in The Physical Review. Vol. 43, Second Series, No. 6., pp. 491-494. Lancaster, PA and New York, NY: for the American Physical Society by the American Institute of Physics, March 15, 1933. Quarto, the entire issue in original wrappers. Housed in custom cloth box. $2000.

First printing in original wrappers of Carl Anderson's announcement of the discovery of the positron, the first antiparticle.

"Anderson received his Ph.D. in 1930 from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where he worked with physicist Robert Andrews Millikan. Having studied X-ray photoelectrons (electrons ejected from atoms by interaction with high-energy photons) since 1927, he began research in 1930 on gamma rays and cosmic rays. While studying cloud-chamber photographs of cosmic rays, Anderson found a number of tracks whose orientation suggested that they were caused by positively charged particles—but particles too small to be protons. In 1932 he announced that they were caused by positrons, positively charged particles with the same mass as electrons. The claim was controversial until verified the next year by British physicist Patrick M.S. Blackett and Italian Giuseppe Occhialini" (Britannica). Anderson won the 1936 Nobel Prize "for his discovery of the positron." Particle Physics... An Annotated Bibliography: "Discovery of the positron, the first antiparticle, predicted by Dirac." With four photographic illustrations of the cloud chambers. Slight wear to spine, otherwise a fine copy in original wrappers.