HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 1
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 2
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 3
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 4
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 5
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 6
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 7
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 8
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 9
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 10
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938) - photo 11

HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938)

Lot 55
13.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 882
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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Archive
ID 1105618
Lot 55 | HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938)
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
HALL, Edwin Herbert (1855-1938)

‘On a New Action of the Magnet on Electric Currents.’ Offprint from: American Journal of Mathematics, vol. II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 22 November 1879.

Extremely rare offprint, the first appearance in print of the publication of Edwin Hall’s discovery of The Hall Effect, ‘termed by Kelvin as comparable with the greatest ever made by Michael Faraday’ (DSB). The Hall Effect occurs when an electric current is placed in a magnetic field, causing a potential difference and a transverse field is created. By measuring the potential one can calculate the strength of the magnetic field.



The current lot is the first published notice of Hall’s initial results from preliminary experiments undertaken while a graduate student working on his doctoral thesis. Hall opens his paper by noting that he questioned Maxwell's statement in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism: ‘It must be carefully remembered, that the mechanical force which urges a conductor carrying a current across lines of magnetic force, acts, not on the electric current, but on the conductor which carries it.’



In Halls’ opinion, ‘This statement seemed … to be contrary to the most natural supposition … taking into account the fact that a wire not bearing a current is in general not affected by a magnet and that a wire bearing a current is affected directly in proportion to the strength of the current'.



Consequently, Hall, began a series of experiments that would lead to the discovery of the effect that bears his name. Passing a current through a gold leaf conductor in a magnetic field, he found that he produced an electric potential perpendicular to both the current and field. Published some 15 years before George Johnstone Stoney’s description and naming of the electron, Hall’s paper has led to extremely important and wide-ranging applications in the 20th and 21st centuries. These include understanding the behaviour of semiconductors, and the deployment of Hall Effect sensors in current sensing and voltage sensing, motion sensors and motion limitation devices, engine management systems, anti-lock braking mechanisms, in joysticks used to control hydraulic values, and even the development of Hall Effect Thrusters in spacecraft. No offprints or other works by Hall have seemingly appeared at auction (RBH).



Quarto (307 x 238mm). 6pp., 287-292. Original wrappers (worn, upper wrapper detached, extremities frayed with short marginal tears and soiling, corners dogeared, small 20mm marginal chip at fore-edge, the whole loose and sometime folded with faint horizontal creasefold). Provenance: faint mathematical notation in pencil on rear wrapper, author’s name inscribed in pencil on upper wrapper).

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