This manuscript (a chapter of my book in progress) uses two early examples of installation of AC systems to explore the priorities of those who invested in it. Both instances took place in 1902. That year, Alfred Wolff received approval to place his AC system into the New York Stock Exchange (for worker comfort) and Willis Carrier installed the world’s first modern AC system at a Brooklyn factory (to stabilize product).

This chapter tells a parochial story of how Luzerne County was remade as a site for “capital formation” by the activities of holding companies in the 1950s and 1960s, laying groundwork to explain how Salem Township became ripe for predation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Previous speculative frenzies transformed the social fabric along the North Branch. The Connecticut Susquehanna Company colonization of the Wyoming Valley sparked agrarian settler violence feeding the post-Revolutionary “land mania” of the 1790s.

This paper examines how software known as honeypots—deceptive digital systems designed to turn the technique of “social engineering” on hackers—transformed the political economy of expertise in cybersecurity from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s.

Black and white photograph of a 1930s movie theatre on a commercial street.
Movie theater "dish nights" like the one advertised in this ca. 1936 photograph of Miller's State Theatre were once a popular sales incentive that originated in the Great Depression. While the film industry had boomed in the years before the stock market crash of October 1929, economic uncertainty meant that, by the end of 1933, ticket sales had declined sharply, with weekly attendance numbers dropping about 45% nationwide.
 

Cover of the 1910 catalog for Lloyd's Jubilee Fireworks, featuring a child setting off a rocket.

Here's wishing everyone a safe and happy July 4th weekend, especially those of you celebrating with home explosives. 

This 1910 fireworks catalog was produced by the Lloyd Manufacturing Company of New York City. The company was one of a handful of fireworks manufacturers that was later caught up in a minor scandal over municipal graft when the city's 1911 July 4th fireworks displays were found to have been padded. The Lloyd Manufacturing Company supplied the city with fireworks for thirty-three sites in Manhattan at a cost of $14,000, which the city's Commissioner of Accounts later concluded contained about $5,000 worth of skyrocketing costs in unaccounted for and unwarranted charges. 

That said, the company's "Radium Bombshells" sure do sound neat. 

Our country is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While Hagley may not have a copy of the Declaration in its collection, there are other documents bearing the signatures of several of those men who, in signing the Declaration, “mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”.

Others were signed by members of that same generation that became known as the Founding Fathers who helped shape our early republic.

As I approach the halfway mark of my internship here at Hagley, I reflect on some of the patent models that I have researched, including a coal-oil stove to keep food warm, or a model that was packed with the wrong patent tag. The one I chose to highlight here is a stop and waste-valve – not necessarily for the invention itself but the inventor associated to the patent.Patent 127,616

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