MAGAZINE PORTRAIT INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY AMERICAN CHEMIST WILLIS R. WHITNEY, DEVELOPER OF THE GENERAL ELECTRIC RESEARCH LABORATORY.

Circa [1930].. [1930].. Good. - A black-and-white, 7-1/8 inch high by 4-3/4 inch wide portrait has been clipped from a magazine and mounted on a piece of tan card 8-5/8 inches high by 5 inches wide. Inscribed and signed on the mount below the portrait: "To Seymour Halpern / with good wishes / Willis Rodney Whitney". The bottom margin of the mount is creased & darkened & there is a piece out of its bottom right corner. Good. <p>The portrait is a three-quarter length view of Whitney standing at a work bench and working on what appears to be a wireless telegraph. The portrait is inscribed to future Congressman Seymour Halpern, then a young autograph collector.<p>Willis Rodney Whitney [1868-1958] was an American chemist. He began his career at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, specializing in electrochemistry and developing an electrochemical theory of corrosion. From 1900 Whitney was working part-time as an advisor at the newly founded research laboratory of General Electric. He eventually moved into a full-time job at the GE labs. BY 1915 he had about 250 staff members, Irving Langmuir and William David Coolidge among them. They worked on vacuum-and gas- filled lamps, the wireless telegraph and X-ray technology.<p>The Queens, New York Republican Congressman Seymour Halpern (1913-1997) started his political career as a campaign aide to New York's powerful mayor Fiorella La Guardia and first served in New York's State Senate for 14 years before seeking a seat in the U.S. Congress. In Albany Halpern sponsored 279 bills that became law, including measures on schools, housing, civil rights, nutrition and mental health. A Liberal, he was something of an anomaly as the lone Republican representative from New York City, and generally garnered support from Labor Unions and endorsement from the Liberal Party. Yet he never even considered switching parties as he considered membership in the Republican Party a family tradition and commitment. While he found ample time for his private pursuits, including painting and collecting autographs, he took his legislative duties very seriously. Of these, he was proudest of his co-sponsorship of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and of the original 1965 Medicare legislation.