For offer, a very nice old Advertising lithograph letter head / billhead! Fresh from an old prominent estate. Never offered on the market until now. Vintage, Old, Original - NOT a Reproduction - Guaranteed !!
Just as it was found. This came from the recently discovered paper items from the Tallman Funeral Home business in Auburn, NY that have not seen the light of day in over 100 years. Dated 1900. Letter regards Alternating power motors. Nice graphics on top - lithography. Signed letter of D.M. Post. In good to very good condition. Fold marks. NOTE: Will be sent folded up inside envelope as found for ease in shipping. Please see photos and scans for all details and condition. If you collect 19th century Americana advertisement ad history, science, lithography, etc. this is a nice one for your paper or ephemera collection. Genealogy research importance as well. Combine shipping on multiple bid wins! 3197
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
The presence of either a positive or negative electric charge produces an electric field. The motion of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field. In most applications, Coulomb's law determines the force acting on an electric charge. Electric potential is the work done to move an electric charge from one point to another within an electric field, typically measured in volts.
Electricity plays a central role in many modern technologies, serving in electric power where electric current is used to energise equipment, and in electronics dealing with electrical circuits involving active components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies.
The study of electrical phenomena dates back to antiquity, with theoretical understanding progressing slowly until the 17th and 18th centuries. The development of the theory of electromagnetism in the 19th century marked significant progress, leading to electricity's industrial and residential application by electrical engineers by the century's end. This rapid expansion in electrical technology at the time was the driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution, with electricity's versatility driving transformations in industry and society. Electricity is integral to applications spanning transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation, making it the foundation of modern industrial society.[1]
History
A bust of a bearded man with dishevelled hair
Thales, the earliest known researcher into electricity
Main articles: History of electromagnetic theory and History of electrical engineering
See also: Etymology of electricity
Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by electric catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3] Patients with ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.[4]
Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[5][6][7][8] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity. According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature.[9]
A half-length portrait of a bald, somewhat portly man in a three-piece suit.
Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research on electricity in the 18th century, as documented by Joseph Priestley (1767) History and Present Status of Electricity, with whom Franklin carried on extended correspondence.
Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert wrote De Magnete, in which he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[5] He coined the Neo-Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεκτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[10] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[11]
Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.[12] Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[13] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[14] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior[15] of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge in terms of electricity consisting of both positive and negative charges.[12]
Half-length portrait oil painting of a man in a dark suit
Michael Faraday's discoveries formed the foundation of electric motor technology.
In 1775, Hugh Williamson reported a series of experiments to the Royal Society on the shocks delivered by the electric eel;[16] that same year the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter described the structure of the fish's electric organs.[17][18] In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles.[19][20][12] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.[19][20] The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827.[20] Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862.[21]: 148
While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon Parsons, Werner von Siemens, Joseph Swan, Reginald Fessenden, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, electricity turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life.[22]
In 1887, Heinrich Hertz[23]: 843–44 [24] discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets, energising electrons. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[25] The photoelectric effect is also employed in photocells such as can be found in solar panels.
The first solid-state device was the "cat's-whisker detector" first used in the 1900s in radio receivers. A whisker-like wire is placed lightly in contact with a solid crystal (such as a germanium crystal) to detect a radio signal by the contact junction effect.[26] In a solid-state component, the current is confined to solid elements and compounds engineered specifically to switch and amplify it. Current flow can be understood in two forms: as negatively charged electrons, and as positively charged electron deficiencies called holes. These charges and holes are understood in terms of quantum physics. The building material is most often a crystalline semiconductor.[27][28]
Solid-state electronics came into its own with the emergence of transistor technology. The first working transistor, a germanium-based point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947,[29] followed by the bipolar junction transistor in 1948.[30]
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən, mən-/ ⓘ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is coextensive with New York County of the U.S. state of New York, the smallest county by land area in the contiguous United States. Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the State of New York, Manhattan constitutes the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass.[6] Manhattan serves as New York City's economic and administrative center and has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world.[7][8][9][10]
The area of present-day Manhattan was originally part of Lenape territory.[11] European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post founded by Dutch colonists in 1624 on lower Manhattan Island; the post was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.[12] New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.[13] The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of arriving immigrants in the late 19th century and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals.[14] Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898, and houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government.[15] The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBT culture.[16][17] It was also the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed during the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, the borough is mostly bounded by the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers and includes several small adjacent islands, including Roosevelt, U Thant, and Randalls and Wards Islands. It also includes the small neighborhood of Marble Hill now on the U.S. mainland. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a 2020 census population of 1,694,250 living in a land area of 22.66 square miles (58.69 km2),[3][18] or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km2), and its residential property has the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.[19] Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere.[20]
Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial and fintech center of the world,[21][22][23][24] and Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange (at $25.0 trillion as of August 2023) and Nasdaq ($21.7 trillion).[25] Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, as are numerous colleges and universities, such as Columbia University and New York University; the headquarters of the United Nations is also located in the borough. Manhattan hosts three of the world's most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal.[26] Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.[27] The borough hosts many prominent bridges and tunnels, and skyscrapers including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and One World Trade Center.[28] It is also home to the NBA's New York Knicks and the NHL's New York Rangers.