Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer:
the first modern analog computer,
rare first edition with impressive provenance

Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer, the first modern analog computer: totally mechanical in nature, the Differential Analyzer used a complex and ingenious  system of rotating shafts and gears to produce solutions to differential equations that had previously been prohibitively difficult.

BUSH, Vannevar. "The differential analyzer. A new machine for solving differential equations." In Journal of the Franklin Institute 212 (July-December 1931): 447-88. Quarto, green library buckram from the Franklin Institute. $3800.

First edition of the first report of Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer. A remarkable technological feat, Bush’s invention was the most powerful computing machine prior to the electronic digital computer.  

“In 1930, an engineer named Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the first modern analog computer. The Differential Analyzer, as he called it, was an analog calculator that could be used to solve certain classes of differential equations... Utilizing a complicated arrangement of gears and cams driven by steel shafts, the Differential Analyzer could obtain practical (albeit approximate) solutions to problems which up to that point had been prohibitively difficult. The Differential Analyzer was a great success; it and various copies located at other laboratories were soon employed in solving diverse engineering and physics problems” (Britannica). The differential analyzer became a crucial step in the development of the modern computer. Provenance: from the library of the Franklin Institute, the publisher of the journal, with the Institute's name stamped in blind on the front cover.