Apparatus Gallery

Marconi radio apparatus

Marconi radio equipment on a ship. The equipment includes headphones and a Morse code key (lower centre). The equipment is labelled (left-right): continuous wave transmitter; direction finder; receiver; spark transmitter (all on left wall); emergency transmitter (right wall). Marconi patented his radio equipment in 1896. His initial aim had been to allow communication with those at sea. He achieved the first trans-Atlantic radio signal in 1901. Photographed for The March of Commerce (1927), volume 4 of The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States, a 15-volume series that commemorated 150 years since the founding of the USA in 1776

© HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES LIBRARY/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Marconi radio valve

Marconi radio valve. This is a Marconi transmitter valve of the type M.T.6. Marconi patented his radio equipment in 1896, founding a company in 1897 to build the new equipment. The thermionic valve, or vacuum tube, first developed in 1906, is a device used to amplify or modify a voltage, in this case to transmit a radio signal. Photograph courtesy of the Radio Corporation of America, New York, USA, formed in 1920 from the American Marconi Company. Photographed for The March of Commerce (1927), volume 4 of The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States, a 15-volume series that commemorated 150 years since the founding of the USA in 1776

© HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES LIBRARY/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Distillation, 16th century woodcut

Distillation. Coloured 16th century woodcut depicting apparatus used for distillation. Two liquids to be distilled are being heated in large flasks (bottom left and right) where they boil and turn into gases. The column in the middle is hollow and filled with water to cool and condense the gases as they rise up it. The resulting distillations are collected in the two flasks at upper left and right. This design is from the book Liber de arte destillandi, published by Hieronymus Brunschwyk in Strasbourg in 1500, and was probably never actually carried out in practice

© SHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY