History
The mercury arc rectifier was invented by Peter Cooper Hewitt in 1902 and further developed throughout the 1920s and 1930s by researchers in both Europe and North America. Before the advent of solid-state devices, mercury-arc rectifiers were one of the most efficient rectifiers. Mercury-arc rectifiers or "converters" were used for charging storage batteries and in arc lighting systems where they were found to be more efficient than rotary converters.
Read more about this topic: Mercury-arc Valve
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)