Palo Alto, California

Palo Alto (/ˌpæloʊˈæltoʊ/; Spanish: [ˈpalo ˈalto]; from palo, literally "stick", colloquially "tree", and alto "tall"; meaning: "tall tree") is a charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is named after a coast redwood tree called El Palo Alto.

Palo Alto was established by Leland Stanford Sr. when he founded Stanford University, following the death of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. The city includes portions of Stanford and is headquarters to a number of high-technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard (HP), Space Systems/Loral, VMware, Tesla Motors, Ford Research and Innovation Center, PARC, Ning, IDEO, Skype, and Palantir Technologies. It has also served as an incubator to several other high-technology companies such as Google,Facebook, Logitech,Intuit, Pinterest, and PayPal.

El Palo Alto

El Palo Alto is a Sequoia sempervirens (coast redwood tree) located in El Palo Alto Park on the banks of San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto, California, United States. El Palo Alto means the tall stick in Spanish.

El Palo Alto is currently 110 feet (33.5 meters) in height, down from 162.2 feet (49.4 meters) in 1814, its top progressively dying from 1865 to 1955 from lowering of the water table so that its roots could no longer reach water. The landmark redwood is 90 inches (2.3 meters) in diameter, and has a crown spread of 40 feet (12 meters). In 1955, an increment boring of the tree rings was taken and the tree's age was accurately determined to be 1,015 years. El Palo Alto originally had twin trunks, but an 1886 flood and windstorm in the San Francisquito arroyo downed one of the two trunks.

History

The tree is California Historical Landmark No. 2 (number 1 is the Old Customhouse in Monterey). It is recognized by the National Arborist Association and International Society of Arboriculture for its historical significance as "a campsite for the Portola Expedition Party of 1769"; being frequented by the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians; and for its use as a sighting tree by surveyors plotting out El Camino Real. The tree is depicted on the city of Palo Alto's official seal and on the seal of Stanford University. It is the origin of the city's name.

Palo

Palo may refer to:

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People with the surname

Other uses

Alto

The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian (Latin: altus), refers to the second highest part of a contrapuntal musical texture and is also applied to its associated vocal range, especially in choral music. More rarely it describes the highest male solo voice type (usually designated countertenor), and it is also the root word of contralto, the lowest standard female voice type. When designating instruments, "alto" likewise can refer either to the corresponding vocal range (alto flute and alto trombone) or to musical role (alto recorder and alto clarinet).

Etymology

In choral music for mixed voices, "alto" describes the lowest part commonly sung by women. The explanation for the anomaly of this name is to be found not in the use of adult falsettists in choirs of men and boys but further back in innovations in composition during the mid-15th century. Before this time it was usual to write a melodic cantus or superius against a tenor (from Latin tenere, to hold) or 'held' part, to which might be added a contratenor, which was in counterpoint with (in other words, against = contra) the tenor. The composers of Ockeghem's generation wrote two contratenor parts and designated them as contratenor altus and contratenor bassus; they were respectively higher and lower than the tenor part. From these derive both the modern terms "alto" (and contralto) and "bass".