Electricity
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In early days, electricity was considered as being not related to magnetism. On, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell's equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others; the presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges produces a magnetic field; when a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. Thus, if that charge were to move, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge, thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of positive charge from an arbitrarily chosen reference point to that point without any acceleration and is measured in volts.
Electricity is at the heart of many modern technologies, being used for: electric power where electric current is used to energise equipment. Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Practical applications for electricity were few, it would not be until the late nineteenth century that electrical engineers were able to put it to industrial and residential use; the rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution. Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an limitless set of applications which include transport, lighting and computation. Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society. 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", described them as the "protectors" of all other fish.
Electric fish were again reported millennia by ancient Greek and Arabic naturalists and physicians. Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by catfish and electric rays, knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects. Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them; the earliest and nearest approach to the discovery of the identity of lightning, electricity from any other source, is to be attributed to the Arabs, who before the 15th century had the Arabic word for lightning ra‘ad applied to the electric ray. 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.
Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but 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. 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, he coined the New Latin word electricus to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed. 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. Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay.
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. A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature, he explained the paradoxical behavior 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. In 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectromagnetics, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which neurons passed signals to the muscles. 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 used; the recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric
Gas Light and Coke Company
The Gas Light and Coke Company, was a company that made and supplied coal gas and coke. The headquarters of the company were located on Horseferry Road in London, it is identified as the original company. The company was founded by Frederick Albert Winsor, from Germany, incorporated by Royal Charter on 30 April 1812 under the seal of King George III, it was the first company set up to supply London with gas, operated the first gas works in the United Kingdom, the world's first public gas works. It was governed by a "Court of Directors", which met for the first time on 24 June 1812; the original capitalisation was £1 million, in 80,000 shares. Offices were established with a wharf at Cannon Row. In 1818 the company established a tar works in Poplar and expanded their works at Brick Lane and Westminster. Under the company's chief engineer, Samuel Clegg, a gas works was installed at the Royal Mint in 1817 and by 1819 nearly 290 miles of pipes had been laid in London, supplying 51,000 burners. Clegg developed a practical gas meter.
The Company absorbed numerous smaller companies, including the Wellclose undertaking, the City of London Gas Light and Coke Company, the Great Central Gas Consumer's Company, the Equitable Gas Light Company, the Victoria Docks Gas Company, Western Gas Light Company, Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company, the Cricklewood undertaking, the Independent Gas Light and Coke Company, the London Gas Light Company, the West Ham Gas Company, the Barking Gas Company, the Chigwell and Woodford Gas Company, the Ilford Gas Company, the Richmond Gas Company, the Brentford Gas Company, the Grays and Tilbury Gas Company, the Pinner Gas Company, the Brentwood Gas Company and the Southend-on-Sea and District Gas Company. The GLCC's constituent companies had themselves absorbed smaller companies, including the Aldgate Gas Light and Coke Company by the City of London Company, the Billericay undertaking by the Grays Company, Caslon's undertaking by the Imperial Company, the Great Stanmore Gas Company by the Harrow Company, the Harrow and Stanmore Company by the Brentford Company, the Ingatestone and Fryerning Gas Company by the Brentwood Company, the Laindon Gas Company by the Grays Company, the Leigh-on-Sea undertaking by the Southend Company, Mackintosh's undertaking by the Imperial Company, the North Woolwich undertaking by the Victoria Docks Gas Company, the Norwood undertaking by the Brentford Company, the Rayleigh undertaking by the Grays Company, the Richmond Gas Company by the Brentford Company, the Rochford undertaking by the Southend Company, the Staines and Egham District Gas and Coke Company by the Brentford Company, the Stanford-le-Hope Gas Company by the Grays Company, the Sunbury Gas Consumers' Company by the Brentford Company, the Whitechapel Road Gas Light and Coke Company by the Imperial Company.
With the advent of electricity the company expanded into domestic services, with "Lady Demonstrators" employed to promote gas cooking. This home service developed into a full advisory service on domestic gas use. In 1948 the GLCC supplied an area of 547 square miles from Egham in Surrey, Pinner in North West London to Southend-on-Sea in Essex, it supplied a population of 4.5 million, in 1948 had 21,250 employees and sold 276.7 million Therms of gas. On 1 May 1949 the GLCC was nationalised under the Gas Act 1948 and became the major part of the new North Thames Gas Board, one of Britain's twelve regional area gas boards; the following thirteen gasworks were in operation when the GLCC was dissolved in 1949. Beckton Gas Works were built in 1868 on East Ham Levels east of London; the site was named "Beckton" after Simon Adams Beck. The vast 550 acres not only gave the GLCC room for much more gas production than at Nine Elms, but was downriver of the Pool of London and so could be served by larger colliers.
In 1872 five men were gaoled for 12 months following a strike at the Beckton works in support of two workers sacked for requesting a pay rise. The sentence was subsequently reduced to four months. In 1889 men were laid off from Beckton, prompting the founding of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers, which subsequently became part of the General, Municipal and Allied Trades Union. Engineer to the St Pancras works in 1903, the Shoreditch works in 1905, in 1906 he was appointed Resident Engineer of the Beckton works of the Gas Light and Coke Co; the Resident Engineer from 1906 was Joseph Newell Reeson who went on to undertake world first experiments with welded gas holder construction. Productive capacity: 119.12 million cubic feet per day in 1948. Bow Common gasworks was built by the Great Central Gas Consumers' Company in 1850 the works was remote from its supply area in the City and the East End. By the late 1850s the works had fallen into “ruinous disrepair”; the Great Central was absorbed by the GLCC in 1870.
The Bow Common works was rebuilt by the GLCC in the early 1930s. Productive capacity was 10.5 million cubic feet per day in 1948. The Brentford Gas Company was established in 1820, its gasworks at Brentford was therefore one of the oldest in the country, he company grew to supply Acton, Hanwell, Heston
Marsham Street
Marsham Street is a street in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is a mile in length and runs south from Great Peter Street, near Victoria Street and Parliament Square. Marsham Street bisects Horseferry Road and backs on to Smith Square, home to the Conservative Party. Like many streets in the area, it has long been the location to offices of the Government of the United Kingdom, is home to the Home Office and the Department for Transport, the Department for Communities and Local Government; the offices include those designed by Robert Atkinson just before his death, but they are not well regarded. Along with Great Smith Street to the north, John Islip Street to the south, it is designated the B326 in the Great Britain road numbering scheme. Marsham Street has been subject to a number of high end residential developments formed out of what used to be Westminster Hospital and associated former nursing accommodation; these developments were completed in the period 2005 to 2007, are now attracting purchasers who traditionally would have sought out accommodation in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, but are attracted by high specification buildings and attractive pricing by developers
BG Group
BG Group plc was a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in Reading, United Kingdom. On 8 April 2015, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire BG Group for $70 billion, subject to regulatory and shareholder agreement; the sale was completed on 15 February 2016. Prior to the takeover, BG Group was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Prior to its acquisition by Shell, BG Group had operations in 25 countries across Africa, Australasia, North America and South America and produced around 680,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, it had a major Liquefied Natural Gas business and was the largest supplier of LNG to the United States. As at 31 December 2009 it had total proven commercial reserves of 2.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The company was created in 1997 when British Gas plc divested Centrica and became BG plc, reorganised in 1999 as BG Group plc. On 23 October 2000, a further demerger separated the company into BG Group.
Lattice took ownership of Transco, Advantica along with the property and transport companies and BG Group took ownership of gas fields and other assets. In 2002, Lattice merged with National Grid Company to become National Grid Transco, renamed National Grid in 2005. In September 2007, BG Group delisted its ADRs from the New York Stock Exchange. Instead its shares began trading on the US over-the-counter market. In June 2008 BG Group made a US$13.1 billion bid to acquire Origin Energy, Australia's largest coal-seam gas producer, but were outmanoeuvred by ConocoPhillips, who offered to invest US$9.1 billion in a joint venture with Origin. However, in October 2008 BG Group bought Queensland Curtis LNG for US$3.4bn in order to operate in Asia's liquefied natural gas market, on 1 November 2010 BG Group announced plans to invest £9.3bn on the world's first project to liquefy and ship gas produced from coal deposits – the first in a series of "coal seam methane" projects in the region of eastern Australia.
In October 2011 BG Group signed an US$8 billion deal with Cheniere Energy to export liquefied natural gas from the United States. In October 2012 BG sold its 65% majority stake in Gujarat Gas Company for $470 million to the state-run Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation. In January 2014, BG Group announced the initial drilling of an oil exploration well offshore in Kenya. In April 2015, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire BG Group for $70 billion, subject to regulatory and shareholder agreement. If complete, BG shareholders will own 19% of the combined group, Shell will have extensive access to BG's LNG assets, accelerating its global LNG and deep water strategy. Finalisation of the BG acquisition by Royal Dutch Shell was completed on 15 February 2016. BG Group's main business was the exploration and extraction of natural gas and oil and the production of liquefied natural gas, it sold these products to wholesale customers such as retail gas suppliers and electricity generating companies.
It owned some gas pipelines and was involved in some power generation projects. It was active around the world, with only a minority of its business being in the UK. BG Group was a multinational company with operations in 27 countries. Key areas for the company included: Australia QGC, coal seam gas upstream plays in Queensland's Surat and Bowen basin, Curtis Island based LNG plant Brazil Interests in the Tupi, Iara and Iracema fields in the Santos Basin off the coast of southeastern Brazil Egypt Operates the Rosetta and West Delta Deep Marine gas fields, LNG export India Interest in the Panna-Mukta and Tapti fields, Mahanagar Gas Limited. Kazakhstan Interest in the Karachaganak gas field Norway Exploration licences with several discoveries Thailand Interest in the Bongkot gas field Trinidad & Tobago NCMA gas fields, Dolphin gas field, LNG export Tunisia Operates the Miskar and Hasdrubal gas fields UK Interests in several oil and gas fields in the UK continental shelf, including operating the Armada and Lomond gas fields and the Blake oil field, Interest in the Dragon LNG import terminal USA Interest in LNG Terminals, shale gas joint venture operation in the Haynesville and Marcellus plays, Houston.
Sir Frank Chapman was appointed Chief Executive of the BG Group in October 2000. His remuneration for this role in 2008 consisted of a £ 1,944,000 bonus. Chapman stood down at the end of 2012 after 12 years as CEO, was replaced by Chris Finlayson managing director for'BG Advance', a business function within the Group. Chapman continued as an advisor to BG Group until he retired in June 2013. Finlayson resigned, replaced by Andrew Gould. On 15 October 2014 the company announced that Helge Lund, former CEO of Statoil, would become CEO. Lund left the company on 15 February 2016 following successful completion of the Shell acquisition and was replaced by a Shell appointed transition CEO. RepRisk listed the BG Group as seventh in its top ten of "Most Environmentally and Socially Controversial Companies of 2010". Reasons for the company's inclusion are as follows; the BG Group were associated with deep-sea drilling plans in the Sicilian Strait. Karachaganak Petroleum Operating consortium that includes BG was fined USD 21 million for environmental violations at the onshore Karachaganak Oil and Gas Field.
BG subsidiary Queensland Gas Company's Queensland Curtis LNG Project had caused controversy in Aust
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
George III of the United Kingdom
George III was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death in 1820. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire before becoming King of Hanover on 12 October 1814, he was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, but unlike his two predecessors, he was born in Great Britain, spoke English as his first language, never visited Hanover. His life and with it his reign, which were longer than those of any of his predecessors, were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdoms, much of the rest of Europe, places farther afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of Britain's American colonies were soon lost in the American War of Independence.
Further wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 concluded in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In the part of his life, George III had recurrent, permanent, mental illness. Although it has since been suggested that he had bipolar disorder or the blood disease porphyria, the cause of his illness remains unknown. After a final relapse in 1810, a regency was established. George III's eldest son, Prince of Wales, ruled as Prince Regent until his father's death, when he succeeded as George IV. Historical analysis of George III's life has gone through a "kaleidoscope of changing views" that have depended on the prejudices of his biographers and the sources available to them; until it was reassessed in the second half of the 20th century, his reputation in the United States was one of a tyrant. George was born in London at Norfolk House in St James's Square, he was the grandson of King George II, the eldest son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha.
As he was born two months prematurely and thought unlikely to survive, he was baptised the same day by Thomas Secker, both Rector of St James's and Bishop of Oxford. One month he was publicly baptised at Norfolk House, again by Secker, his godparents were the King of Sweden, his uncle the Duke of Saxe-Gotha and his great-aunt the Queen of Prussia. Prince George grew into a healthy but shy child; the family moved to Leicester Square, where George and his younger brother Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, were educated together by private tutors. Family letters show that he could read and write in both English and German, as well as comment on political events of the time, by the age of eight, he was the first British monarch to study science systematically. Apart from chemistry and physics, his lessons included astronomy, French, history, geography, commerce and constitutional law, along with sporting and social accomplishments such as dancing and riding, his religious education was wholly Anglican.
At age 10, George took part in a family production of Joseph Addison's play Cato and said in the new prologue: "What, tho' a boy! It may with truth be said, A boy in England born, in England bred." Historian Romney Sedgwick argued that these lines appear "to be the source of the only historical phrase with which he is associated". George's grandfather, King George II, disliked the Prince of Wales, took little interest in his grandchildren. However, in 1751 the Prince of Wales died unexpectedly from a lung injury at the age of 44, George became heir apparent to the throne, he inherited his father's title of Duke of Edinburgh. Now more interested in his grandson, three weeks the King created George Prince of Wales. In the spring of 1756, as George approached his eighteenth birthday, the King offered him a grand establishment at St James's Palace, but George refused the offer, guided by his mother and her confidant, Lord Bute, who would serve as Prime Minister. George's mother, now the Dowager Princess of Wales, preferred to keep George at home where she could imbue him with her strict moral values.
In 1759, George was smitten with Lady Sarah Lennox, sister of the Duke of Richmond, but Lord Bute advised against the match and George abandoned his thoughts of marriage. "I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation," he wrote, "and must act contrary to my passions." Attempts by the King to marry George to Princess Sophie Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel were resisted by him and his mother. The following year, at the age of 22, George succeeded to the throne when his grandfather, George II, died on 25 October 1760, two weeks before his 77th birthday; the search for a suitable wife intensified. On 8 September 1761 in the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, the King married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he met on their wedding day. A fortnight on 22 September both were crowned at Westminster Abbey. George remarkably never took a mistress, the couple enjoyed a genuinely happy marriage until his mental illness struck, they had 15 children -- six daughters. In 1762, George purchased Buckingham House for use as a family retreat.
His other residences were Windsor Castle. St James's Palace was retained for
