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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla born in the United States?
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Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla born in the United States?
no
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla hired by Edison?
Yes
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla hired by Edison?
yes
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Nikola_Tesla
When did Tesla demonstrate wireless communication (radio)?
1893
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Nikola_Tesla
When did Tesla demonstrate wireless communication (radio)?
1893
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
What is the SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction?
the tesla
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
What is the SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction?
the tesla
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla regarded as a mad scientist?
Yes
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Nikola_Tesla
Was Tesla regarded as a mad scientist?
yes
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
What type of current did Tesla invent?
AC
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Who was the victor of the "War of Currents"?
Tesla
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Who was the victor of the "War of Currents"?
Nikola Tesla
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Where did Tesla study electrical engineering?
the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. 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Nikola_Tesla
Where did Tesla study electrical engineering?
Austrian Polytechnic in Graz
data/set4/a3
Nikola_Tesla Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (July 10 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatian Krajina, Military Frontier, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have deemed him "the man who invented the twentieth century" Title of a biography by Robert Lomas (seen) and "the patron saint of modern electricity." Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," book synopsis After his demonstration of wireless communication (radio) in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. /ref> Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy by Thomas Valone but due to his eccentric personality and unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist. Childress, David Hatcher, (ed.) "The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy & Wireless Transmission of Power". Adventures Unlimited Press, 2000. ISBN Lomas, Robert, " The essay," Spark of genius. Independent Magazine, August 21 1999. Never having put much focus on his finances, Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ), the tesla, was named in his honour (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960). Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics Cheney, Margaret, "Tesla: Man Out of Time", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. Front cover flap , and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio. Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early new age occultism. Tesla is honoured in both Serbia and Croatia, as well as his adopted home, the United States. According to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospić, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia. Dommermuth-Costa, Carol, Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius, pp. 11-12. 1994. ISBN Nikola Tesla's birth house and statue in Smiljan His baptism certificate reports that he was born on June 28 (N.S. July 10) , 1856, and christened by the Serbian Orthodox priest Toma Oklobdžija. His father was Rev. Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. Milutin was born on 19 February 1819 in the village of Meduc, county Medak in Lika, Austrian Empire, as son of Nikola Tesla (b. 1789 in the military frontier, settled after his service in the Napoleonic Wars in Gospic in 1815) and Ana Kalinić, from the famous frontier Kalinic family. Tesla's family asserted its last name as such in Lika. His paternal origin is thought to be of the Draganić family from the Tara valley area below the geographical entity known as Old Vlach, from one of the local Serb clans; however genealogical research shows that Nikola is from the Herzegovinian noble Komnenović (modern-day Old Herzegovina in Montenegro), from its Orlović subgroup that traces its origin from the semi-mythic Pavle Orlovic that bore Prince Lazar's banner at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. His mother was Đuka Mandić, herself a daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest. She came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools. She memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read. Seifer, "Wizard" p 7 His godfather, Jovan Drenovac, was a captain in the army protecting the Military Frontier. Nikola was one of five children, having one brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning". Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. His family moved to Gospić in 1862. Tesla went to school in Karlovac. He finished a four year term in the span of three years. Walker, E. H. (1900). Leaders of the 19th century with some noted characters of earlier times, their efforts and achievements in advancing human progress vividly portrayed for the guidance of present and future generations. Chicago: A.B. Kuhlman Co., Page 474. Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. " The Book of New York: Forty Years' Recollections of the American Metropolis" says he matriculated 4 degrees (physics, mathematics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures. Nikola Tesla: the European Years, D. Mrkich Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year. According to a college roommate, he did not graduate. . Cited in Seifer, Marc, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, 1996 In December 1878 he left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in Mura. He went to Maribor, Slovenia, where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. However after his father died he left the university, having completed only one term. Nikola Tesla as a young man Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood. In 1881, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, to work under Tivadar Puskás in a telegraph company, James Grant Wilson, John Fiske, Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Page 261. the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojša Petrović, a young inventor from Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power. On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker. " Did Tesla really invent the loudspeaker?". Twenty First Century Books, Breckenridge, CO. In 1882 he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 1888). Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Seifer, "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" - page 94 Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidžo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospić and the village of Tomingaj near Gračac, the birthplace of his mother. On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. "Master of Lightning" by Public Broadcasting Service. Website He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job. In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators. During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) Adjusting the reported given amount of money for inflation', the $50,000 in 1885 would equal $1,082,008.74 in 2006 if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. Clifford A. Pickover, Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. HarperCollins, 1999. 352 pages. Page 14. ISBN 0688168949 "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla, printed in Electrical Experimenter Feb-June, 1919. Reprinted, edited by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. ISBN Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week. At Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Jonnes,"Empire of light" p110 Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time – ironically for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches. In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project. In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888. In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances. In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes. By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Röntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will [... enable one to] generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." N. Tesla, "High frequency oscillators for electro-therapeutic and other purposes". Proceedings of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association, American Electro-Therapeutic Association. Page 25. He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with current facts, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible. He early on stated, Tesla later stated, Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895. A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, A Survey of Laser Lightning Rod Techniques - Barnes, Arnold A., Jr. ; Berthel, Robert O. and has been proposed for disabling vehicles. Frequently Asked Questions - HSV Technologies Vehicle Disabling Weapon by Peter A. Schlesinger, President, HSV Technologies, Inc. - NDIA Non-Lethal Defense IV 20-22 Mar 2000 Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Norrie, H. S., "Induction Coils: How to make, use, and repair them". Norman H. Schneider, 1907, New York. 4th edition. Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891. On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings, but ironically due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the astonished police arrived. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp162-164 He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission. Krumme, Katherine, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: Thunder and Lightning. December 4, 2000 (PDF) Some of Tesla's closest friends were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy teachings of the Swami Vivekananda. Grotz, Toby, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo used to generate AC which is used to transport electricity across great distances. It is contained in . When Tesla was 36 years old, the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. He continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, building the first radio transmitter. In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Tesla's demonstrations were written about widely through various media outlets. Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was just merely a question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which for the first time devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was an historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs. Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg made of copper stand on end in his demonstration of the device he constructed known as the "Egg of Columbus". Also in the late 1880s, Tesla and Edison became adversaries in part due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC. As a result of the "War of Currents," Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. Waser, André, "Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent ( ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control. Tesla, Nikola, " My Inventions", Electrical Experimenter magazine, Feb, June, and Oct, 1919. ISBN (teslaplay.comversion; also the version at rastko.org) In 1898, a radio-controlled boat was demonstrated to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. These devices had an innovative coherer and a series of logic gates. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton" and said of it, "You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race." Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light ISBN 0-375-75884-4. Page 355, referencing O'Neill, John J., Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: David McKay, 1944), p.167. Radio remote control remained a novelty until the 1960s. In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained , "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments. Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves. Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless". Electrical Experimenter, May 1919. ( also at pbs.org) At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long). Gillispie, Charles Coulston, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography"; Tesla, Nikola. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ISBN Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time. Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance). In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla, Nikola, " Talking with Planets". Collier's Weekly, February 19, 1901. (EarlyRadioHistory.us) He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of one, two, three, and four clicks together. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after that he thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have simply been an observation of a non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals. Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for his next project, the establishment of a wireless power transmission facility that would be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The United States Patent Office classification system currently assigns this patent to the primary Class 178/43 ("telegraphy/space induction"), although the other applicable classes include 505/825 ("low temperature superconductivity-related apparatus"). In 1900, with $150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was finally dismantled for scrap during World War I. Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly." In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent. On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910 1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100 5000 hp. Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915 in a press dispatch, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that due to their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their enormous scientific contributions, and that each sought to minimize the other one's achievements and right to win the award, that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first, and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" pp228-229 In the following events after the rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Seifer, "Wizard" pp378-380 Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers. In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against the claims of Marconi. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless. In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies. Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article (December 20, 1914). Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded, cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation. At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt. In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. Tesla, in August 1917, first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units. Page, R.M., "The Early History of RADAR", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). In 1934, Émile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations. On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft. In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Janković of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." Tesla's response to Vlatko Maček in 1936 When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Prepared Statement by Nikola Tesla downloadable from www.tesla.hu The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory. The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle, Tesla stated in 1925 that: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York. Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it: Tesla also argued: Tesla, also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview: Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. "Tesla's Ray". Time, July 23, 1934. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray. "Tesla, at 78, Bares New 'Death-Beam"', New York Times, July 11, 1934. "Tesla Invents Peace Ray". New York Sun, July 10, 1934. In total, the components and methods included: "Death-Ray Machine Described", New York Sun, July 11, 1934. "A Machine to End War". Feb. 1935. # An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished. # A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished. # A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism. # A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla". ISBN (HC) pg. 454 Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion). Seifer, "Wizard" pg. 454 Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation: The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. "'Death Ray' for Planes". New York Times, September 22, 1940. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. "Aerial Defense 'Death-Beam' Offered to U. S. By Tesla" July 12, 1940 He also offered this invention to European countries. O'Neill, John J., " Tesla Tries To Prevent World War II". (unpublished Chapter 34 of Prodigal Genius) (PBS) None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans. Velox, Particle beam weapon. everything2.com Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics. This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel. The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a viewscreen. Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer. Bust of Tesla by Ivan Meštrović, 1952, in Zagreb, Croatia Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio. Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government's Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called "peace ray" constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case "most secret", because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents. Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. One document states that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]". Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several "missing" papers and property. Statue of Nikola Tesla in Niagara Falls State Park on Goat Island, New York; There is another statue with Tesla standing in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Nikola Tesla Museum Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day. Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (1863-1923). The portrait survived in the collection of Ludwig Nissen, Brooklyn, see: Klaus Lengsfeld: Sammlung Ludwig Nissen : Husum 1855 - 1924 New York; Dokumentation d. Kunstsammlung Ludwig Nissens anlässl. d. Ausstellung zu seinem 125. Geburtstag im Nissenhaus zu Husum, 1980, 169 S. (= Schriften des Nordfriesischen Museums Ludwig-Nissen-Haus, Nr. 16) His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb's city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986. The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\, ) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. IEEE, " IEEE Nikola Tesla Award. April 01, 2005. The Tesla crater on the far side of the Moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after him. [[Image:100RSD front.jpg|thumb|left|200px|100 Serbian dinar banknote obverse. Photo courtesy of National Bank of Serbia. National Bank of Serbia ]] 100 Serbian dinars banknote reverse. Note the drawing of the electric motor. Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday. An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla [...] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval. Why the Name "Tesla"?, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2006 The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named 'Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d'. ('Nikola Tesla' was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla's pioneering work in wireless communication. The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla's house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla's father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla's work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society. in New York. Alongside Tesla's house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. In the years after, many of his innovations, theories and claims have been used, at times unsuitably and with some controversy, to support various fringe theories that are regarded as unscientific. Most of Tesla's own work conformed with the principles and methods accepted by science, but his extravagant personality and sometimes unrealistic claims, combined with his unquestionable genius, have made him a popular figure among fringe theorists and believers in conspiracies about 'hidden knowledge'. Some conspiracy theorists even in his time believed that he was actually an angelic being from Venus sent to Earth to reveal scientific knowledge to humanity. Tesla was fluent in many languages. Along with Serbo-Croatian, he also spoke seven other foreign languages: Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin. Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kerryr.net and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three. Tesla was also noted to be physically revolted by jewelry, notably pearl earrings. He was fastidious about cleanliness and hygiene, and was by all accounts germaphobic. He greatly disliked touching round objects and human hair other than his own. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing some into his hotel room with him. Tesla was an animal-lover, often reflecting contentedly about a childhood cat, "The Magnificent Macak". Tesla never married. He was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense. Tesla was prone to alienating himself and was generally soft-spoken. However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of him. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force..." His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul." Tesla's friend Hawthorne wrote that, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink." Nevertheless, Tesla displayed the occasional cruel streak; he openly expressed his disgust for overweight people, once firing a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize others' clothing as well, demanding a subordinate to go home and change her dress on several occasions. Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure. He refused to hold conventions without his Tesla coil blasting electricity throughout the room, despite the audience often being terrified, though he assured them everything was perfectly safe. Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab, spring 1894 In middle age, Nikola Tesla became very close friends with Mark Twain. They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere. Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his incident with Edison. The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla, who was quoted as saying, Shortly before Edison died, he said that his biggest mistake he had made was in trying to develop directed current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp. Tesla was good friends with Robert Underwood Johnson. He had amicable relations with Francis Marion Crawford, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey. Tesla made his first million at the age of forty, but gave away nearly all his royalties on future innovations. Tesla was rather financially inept, but he was almost entirely unconcerned with material wealth. He ripped up a Westinghouse contract that would have made him the world's first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power, and in part because it would run Westinghouse out of business, and Tesla had no desire to deal with the creditors. Tesla lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327. There, near the end of his life, when Tesla was slipping into what many consider an altered state of mind, he would claim to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a "final blow" to himself and his work. Tesla believed that war could not be avoided until the cause for its recurrence was removed, but was opposed to wars in general. Secor, H. Winfield, " Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. He sought to reduce distance, such as in communication for better understanding, transportation, and transmission of energy, as a means to ensure friendly international relations. " Giant Eye to See Round the World" Albany Telegram, February 25, 1923 (doc). Like many of his era, Tesla, a life-long bachelor, became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated, In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future. Kennedy, John B., " When woman is boss, An interview with Nikola Tesla". Colliers, January 30, 1926. In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to it [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance." He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel". Nikola Tesla, " The Problem of Increasing Human Energy". Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900. In his final years he suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sound and other influences. O'Neill, "Prodigal Genius" (extract at Electrosensitivity.org - Q&A) A monument to Tesla was established at Niagara Falls, New York, USA. The monument was officially unveiled on Sunday, July 9, 2006 on the 150th anniversary of Tesla's birth. The Monument was sponsored by St. George Serbian Church, Niagara Falls, and designed by Les Drysdale of Hamilton, Ontario. Mr. Drysdale's design was the winning design from an international competition. Another monument to Tesla, featuring him standing on a portion of an alternator, was established at Queen Victoria Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. A number of live theatrical plays based on Tesla's life have been produced and staged worldwide. *The Canadian theatrical company Electric Company Theatre took its stage production Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla on tour first starting in 1996. In August 2007, their production was again listed on their current performance schedule. *The Austin, Texas based theatrical collective Rude Mechanicals created and then produced Kirk Lynn's Requiem For Tesla in January/Feb of 2001, and then presented again at the Fresh Terrain Festival in February 2003 * List of Tesla patents * Nikola Tesla in popular culture * Teslascope --> * Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, "Tesla, Master of Lightning", published by Barnes & Noble, 1999. ISBN 0760710058. * Germano, Frank, " Dr. Nikola Tesla". Frank. Germano.com. * Lomas, Robert, " The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century". Lecture to South Western Branch of Instititute of Physics. * Martin, Thomas Commerford, "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla", New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894 (3rd Ed); reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1995 ISBN-X * O'Neill, John J., " Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola", 1944. ISBN (Tesla reportedly said of this biographer "You understand me better than any man alive"; also the version at uncletaz.com with other items at uncletaz's site) * Penner, John R.H. The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla, corrupted version of My Inventions. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * " Nikola Tesla". IEEE History Center, 2005. * Seifer, Marc J. "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla; Biography of a Genius", Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN * Weisstein, Eric W., " Tesla, Nikola (1856 1943)". Eric Weisstein's World of Science. * "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature", Moon Nomenclature: Crater. USGS, Astrogeology Research Program. * Dimitrijevic, Milan S., "Belgrade Astronomical Observatory Historical Review". Publ. Astron. Obs. Belgrade,), 162 170. Also, "Srpski asteroidi, Tesla". Astronomski magazine. * Hoover, John Edgar, et al., FOIA FBI files, 1943. * Pratt, H., "Nikola Tesla 1856 1943", Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 44, September, 1956. * W.C. Wysock, J.F. Corum, J.M. Hardesty and K.L. Corum, " Who Was The Real Dr. Nikola Tesla? (A Look At His Professional Credentials)". Antenna Measurement Techniques Association, posterpaper, October 22 25, 2001 (PDF) * Roguin, Ariel, "Historical Note: Nikola Tesla: The man behind the magnetic field unit". J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2004;19:369 374. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. * Sellon, J. L., "The impact of Nikola Tesla on the cement industry". Behrent Eng. Co., Wheat Ridge, CO. Cement Industry Technical Conference. 1997. XXXIX Conference Record., 1997 IEEE/PC. Page(s) 125 133. ISBN * Valentinuzzi, M.E., "Nikola Tesla: why was he so much resisted and forgotten?" Inst. de Bioingenieria, Univ. Nacional de Tucuman; Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE. July/August 1998, 17:4, p 74 75. ISSN * Waser, André, " Nikola Tesla’s Radiations and the Cosmic Rays". (PDF) * Secor, H. Winfield, "Tesla's views on Electricity and the War", Electrical Experimenter, Volume 5, Number 4, August, 1917. * Florey, Glen, "Tesla and the Military". Engineering 24, December 5, 2000. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, "Nikola Tesla, Lightning Observations, and Stationary Waves". 1994. * Corum, K. L., J. F. Corum, and A. H. Aidinejad, "Atmospheric Fields, Tesla's Receivers and Regenerative Detectors". 1994. * Meyl, Konstantin, H. Weidner, E. Zentgraf, T. Senkel, T. Junker, and P. Winkels, "Experiments to proof the evidence of scalar waves Tests with a Tesla reproduction". Institut für Gravitationsforschung (IGF), Am Heerbach 5, D-63857 Waldaschaff. * Anderson, L. I., "John Stone Stone on Nikola Tesla’s Priority in Radio and Continuous Wave Radiofrequency Apparatus". The Antique Wireless Association Review, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 18 41. * Anderson, L. I., "Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi". Antique Wireless Association monograph, March 1980. * Marincic, A., and D. Budimir, "Tesla's contribution to radiowave propagation". Dept. of Electron. Eng., Belgrade Univ. (5th International Conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Service, 2001. TELSIKS 2001. pg., 327 331 vol.1) ISBN-X * Page, R.M., "The Early History of Radar", Proceedings of the IRE, Volume 50, Number 5, May, 1962, (special 50th Anniversary Issue). * C Mackechnie Jarvis "Nikola Tesla and the induction motor". 1970 Phys. Educ. 5 280 287. * " Giant Eye to See Round the World" (DOC) * Nichelson, Oliver, " Nikola Tesla's Latter Energy Generation Designs", A description of Tesla's energy generator that "would not consume fuel." 26th IECEC Proceedings, 1991, Boston, MA (American Nuclear Society) Vol. 4, pp 433-438. * Nichelson, Oliver, " The Thermodynamics of Tesla's Fuelless Electrical generator". A theory of the physics of Tesla's new energy generator. (American Chemical Society, 1993. 2722-5/93/0028-63) * Toby Grotz, " The Influence of Vedic Philosophy on Nikola Tesla's Understanding of Free Energy". --> 222px *A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, May 1888. * Selected Tesla Writings, Written by Tesla and others,. * Light Without Heat, The Manufacturer and Builder, January 1892, Vol. 24 * Biography - Nikola Tesla, The Century Magazine, November 1893, Vol. 47 * Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions, The Century Magazine, November 1894, Vol. 49 * The New Telegraphy. Recent Experiments in Telegraphy wih Sparks, The Century Magazine, November 1897, Vol. 55 * Anderson, Leland I., "Dr. Nikola Tesla (1856 1943)", 2d enl. ed., Minneapolis, Tesla Society. 1956. LCCN /L * Cheney, Margaret, "", 1979. ISBN 0743215362. * Childress, David H., "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla," 1993. ISBN * Glenn, Jim, "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla," 1994. ISBN * Jonnes, Jill "". New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN * Martin, Thomas C., "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla," 1894 . ISBN-X * O'Neill, John Jacob,"Prodigal Genius," 1944. Paperback reprint 1994, ISBN 978-0914732334. (ed. Prodigal Genius is available online) * Lomas, Robert,"," 1999. ISBN * Ratzlaff, John and Lee Anderson, "Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography", Ragusan Press, Palo Alto, California, 1979, 237 pages. Extensive listing of articles about and by Nikola Tesla. * Seifer, Marc J., "Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla," 1998. ISBN (HC), ISBN (SC) * Tesla, Nikola, "Colorado Springs Notes, 1899 1900", ISBN-X * Tesla, Nikola, "My Inventions" Parts I through V published in the Electrical Experimenter monthly magazine from February through June, 1919. Part VI published October, 1919. Reprint edition with introductory notes by Ben Johnson, New York: Barnes and Noble,1982, ISBN; also online at " My Inventions", 1919. ISBN * Valone, Thomas, "," 2002. ISBN * Caparica, A.J., "The Adventurers" features Nikola Tesla as a main protagonist. 2007. ISBN * Carlson, W. Bernard, "Inventor of dreams". Scientific American, March 2005 v292 i3 p78(7). * Jatras, Stella L., "The genius of Nikola Tesla". The New American, July 28, 2003 v19 i15 p9(1) * Rybak, James P., "Nikola Tesla: Scientific Savant". Popular Electronics, 1042170X, Nov99, Vol. 16, Issue 11. * Lawren, B., "Rediscovering Tesla". Omni, Mar88, Vol. 10 Issue 6. * There are at least two films describing Tesla's life. In the first, filmed in 1977, arranged for TV, Tesla was portrayed by Rade Šerbedžija. In 1980, Orson Welles produced a Yugoslav film named Tajna Nikole Tesle (The Secret of Nikola Tesla), in which Welles himself played the part of Tesla's patron, J.P. Morgan. Film was directed by Krsto Papić, and Nikola Tesla was portrayed by Petar Božović. * " Tesla: Master of Lightning". 1999. ISBN (Book) ISBN (PBS Video) * Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla (at Google Video) - Phenomenon: the Lost Archives documentary about Tesla's designs for free energy and defensive weapons systems. * David Bowie portrayed Tesla in the 2006 film "The Prestige". Tesla's time in Colorado Springs was the focus of the scenes in the film. * Tesla Resource Surrounding the PBS "Master of Lightning" documentary * The Nikola Tesla museum * Nikola Tesla 150 * Tesla Forum of Western Australia Inc. * World of Scientific Biography: Nikola Tesla, by Wolfsram Research * Nikola Tesla Page * Tesla's grand-nephew William H. Terbo's site * Nikola Tesla, Forgotten American Scientist * The Tesla Wardenclyffe Project. Shoreham, New York. Aims to reuse Wardenclyffe Tower * Nikola Tesla's Father - Milutin Tesla * Tesla - The European Years * Tesla's Case File at The Franklin Institute containing information about his 1894 Franklin Award for research in high-frequency phenomena * Tesla's 'Death-Ray' and the Egg of Columbus, from American Antigravity. * Dr. James Corum's Tesla Engineering Papers, from Arcs 'N Sparks. * Fred Walters' hand-scanned Tesla patents (PDFs) * Jim Bieberich's The Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection * Online archive of many of Tesla's writings, articles and published papers * Seifer, Marc J., and Michael Behar, Electric Mind, Wired Magazine, October 1998. * Palmer, Stephen E., " Wardenclyffe: Nikola Tesla's Dream For Free Energy And The Conspiracy Which Destroyed It". * * Nikola Tesla on various Yugoslavian and Serbian banknotes. * Nikola Tesla's FBI file in pdf * Kenneth M. Swezey Papers, 1891 1982, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, archival resources. Related Wikipedia Articles July 10 1931 Smiljan Gospić Military Frontier Austrian Empire Lika-Senj County Croatia New York City New York United States Austrian Empire Austria-Hungary France United States Serbs Physics mechanical engineering electrical engineering Invention alternating current induction motor rotating magnetic field wireless technology Edison Medal Elliott Cresson Gold Medal John Scott Medal Serbian Cyrillic alphabet 10 July 1856 7 January 1943 inventor physicist mechanical engineer electrical engineer Smiljan Croatian Krajina Military Frontier Serb Austrian Empire American citizen electricity and magnetism List of Tesla patents alternating current electric power polyphase system power distribution Electric motor#AC motors Second Industrial Revolution patron saint Radio radio War of Currents history popular culture mad scientist 21 August 1999 SI magnetic flux density magnetic magnetic field Tesla (unit) Paris electromagnetism robotics remote control radar computer 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Ottawa
Is Ottawa the capital of Canada?
Yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Does Ottawa sit on the Ottowa River?
Yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Do small tremors occur in Ottawa?
Yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What is Ottawa's population?
1,190,982
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What are Ottawa's primary industries?
Logging and lumber
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What is Ottawa's junior ice hockey team?
the Ottawa 67's
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What is Ottawa's major league hockey team?
the Ottawa Senators
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What are Carleton University's athletic teams called?
Carleton Ravens
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Is Ottawa colder than Moscow in January?
Yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Is Ottawa on a river?
yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Is Ottawa on a river?
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Does it snow in Ottawa?
yes
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Does it snow in Ottawa?
yes
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Was there a cholera outbreak in 1832?
yes
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Was there a cholera outbreak in 1832?
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Who is the mayor of Ottawa?
Larry O'Brien
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Who is the mayor of Ottawa?
Larry O'Brien
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
How many townships are in Ottawa?
eleven
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
How many townships are in Ottawa?
eleven
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What's the main highway in Ottawa?
Highway 417, The Queensway
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What's the main highway in Ottawa?
provinical Highway 417
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What was Ottawa's name in 1850?
Bytown
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
What was Ottawa's name in 1850?
Bytown
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Based on the average, in what year will the next small tremor occur in Ottawa?
2009
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Based on the average, in what year will the next small tremor occur in Ottawa?
2009
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Where were immigrants from in the 1800s?
Irish
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Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Where were immigrants from in the 1800s?
Ireland
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Ottawa
Are there also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River ?
Yes.
data/set3/a5
Ottawa Ottawa ( or sometimes ) is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality. With a metropolitan population estimated at 1,190,982 Ottawa is also the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It is located in the Ottawa Valley in the eastern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec. There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities. Ottawa is governed by a 24 member City Council. The members of this council are elected by the residents of Ottawa. Each councillor represents one ward (sub region) within Ottawa. The mayor however represents Ottawa as a whole. City council responsibilities include the maintenance and efficacy of the following services: fire department, paramedics, police department, water, transit, recycling, garbage, and sewage. /ref> The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien. Chaudière Falls before damming and the construction of mills at this part of the river. 1845 painting of Wellington Street looking east, by Thomas Burrowes, one of the street's first residents The Ottawa region was long home to the Odawa or Odaawaa First Nations people. The Odawa are an Algonquin people who called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Liked by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of workers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map. The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (the U.S invasions of Canada in the War of 1812 being a recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons,most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847. Ottawa became a centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ottawa (ON) On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West. The Centre Block, on Parliament Hill. In fact, the Queen's advisers suggested she pick Ottawa for many important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (the post 1841 name for the then united regions formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada, today the Quebec/Ontario border), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable major Canadian cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals. The Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal network meant that Ottawa could be supplied by water from Kingston and Montreal without going along the potentially treacherous US-Canada border. The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about south of Parliament Hill on McLeod Street at Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city. Annexation history of Ottawa On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents Soviet Spy Scandal, from CBC's "Canada: A People's History". Accessed December 22, 2008. . At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, as the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans. In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (85,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Orléans, Ontario (84,695), to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland. Map of Ottawa showing urban area, highways, waterways, and historic townships Ottawa is situated on the south bank of the Ottawa River, and contains the mouths of the Rideau River and Rideau Canal. The oldest part of the city (including what remains of Bytown) is known as Lower Town, and occupies an area between the canal and the rivers. Across the canal to the west lies Centretown (often just called "downtown"), which is the city's financial and commercial hub. Situated between Centretown and the Ottawa River, the slight elevation of Parliament Hill is home to many of the capital's landmark government buildings, including the Peace Tower, and the Legislative seat of Canada. As of June 29, 2007, the Rideau Canal, which stretches to Kingston, Fort Henry and four Martello towers in the Kingston area was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In view: the Rideau Canal, the Rideau River, Colonel By Drive, Carleton University, Downtown Ottawa and the Laurentian mountains The City of Ottawa has a main urban area but there are many other urban, suburban and rural areas within the city's limits. The main suburban area extends a considerable distance to the east, west and south of the centre, and includes the former cities of Gloucester, Nepean and Vanier, the former village of Rockcliffe Park and also the community of Blackburn Hamlet (pop. 8,527), the community of Orléans (pop. 110,000). The Kanata suburban area consists of Kanata (pop. 90,000) and the former village of Stittsville (pop. 20,000). Nepean is another major suburb which also includes Barrhaven (pop. 70,000) and the former village of Manotick (pop. 7,545). There are also the communities of Riverside South (pop. 8,000) on the other side of the Rideau River, Morgan's Grant (pop. 8,000) and Greely (pop. 4,152), southeast of Riverside South. There are also a number of rural communities (villages and hamlets) that lie beyond the greenbelt but are administratively part of the Ottawa municipality. Some of these communities are Burritts Rapids (hamlet, pop. 300); Ashton (hamlet, pop. 300); Fallowfield (hamlet, pop. 600); Kars (small village, pop. 1,539); Fitzroy Harbour (small village, pop. 1,549); Munster (large village, pop. 1,390); Carp (large village, pop. 1,400); North Gower (large village, pop. 1,700); Metcalfe (large village, pop. 1,810); Constance Bay (large village, pop. 2,327) and Osgoode (large village, pop. 2,571) and Richmond (very large village, pop. 3,301). There are also a number of towns in the national capital region but outside the city of Ottawa, one of these urban communities is Almonte, Ontario (town, pop. 4,649). Across the Ottawa River, which forms the border between Ontario and Quebec, lies the city of Gatineau. Although formally and administratively separate cities in two separate provinces, Ottawa and Gatineau (along with a number of nearby municipalities) collectively constitute the National Capital Region, with a combined population exceeding one million residents, which is considered a single metropolitan area. One federal crown corporation (the National Capital Commission, or NCC) has significant land holdings in both cities, including sites of historical and touristic importance. The NCC, through its responsibility for planning and development of these lands, is an important contributor to both cities. Around the main urban area is an extensive greenbelt, administered by the National Capital Commission for conservation and leisure, and comprising mostly forest, farmland and marshland. Ottawa itself is a single-tiered city, meaning it is in itself a census division and has no county or regional municipality government above it. Ottawa is bounded on the east by the United Counties of Prescott and Russell; by Renfrew County and Lanark County in the west; on the south by the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville and the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry; and on the north by the Regional County Municipality of Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais and the City of Gatineau. Ottawa is made up of eleven historic townships, ten of which are from historic Carleton County and one from historic Russell. They are Cumberland, Fitzroy, Gloucester, Goulbourn, Huntley, March, Marlborough, Nepean, North Gower, Osgoode and Torbolton. A house is barely visible from beneath the heavy Ottawa snowfall. Ottawa has a humid continental climate (Koppen Dfb) with a range of temperatures from a record high of 37.8 °C (100°F), recorded July 4, 1913, to a record low of -38.9 °C (-38 °F) recorded on Dec 29, 1933, the third coldest temperature recorded in a capital city (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Moscow, Russia). This extreme range in temperature allows Ottawa to boast a variety of annual activities—more notable events such as the Winterlude Festival on the Rideau Canal in the winter and the National Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill in July—and the requirement of a wide range of clothing. Because of its relatively warm summers, Ottawa is only the seventh coldest capital in the world by annual average temperature, however by mean January temperature, Ottawa ranks third behind Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and Astana, Kazakhstan and has a colder average January temperature than Moscow, much further north than Ottawa. Snow and ice are dominant during the winter season. Ottawa receives about 235 centimetres (93 in) of snowfall annually. Its biggest snowfall was recorded on March 3-4, 1947 with 73 cm (2.5 feet) of snow. Average January temperature is -10.8 °C (13 °F), although days well above freezing and nights below -30 °C (-22 °F) both occur in the winter. The snow season is quite variable; in an average winter, a lasting snow cover is on the ground from mid-December until early April, although some years are snow-free until beyond Christmas, particularly in recent years. The 2007–08 winter season snowfall (436.7 cm / 171.9 inches) came within 10 cm (4 inches) of the record snowfall set in 1970-1971 (444.1 cm / 174.8 inches). High wind chills are common, with annual averages of 51, 14 and 1 days with wind chills below -20 °C (-4 °F), -30 °C (-22 °F) and -40 °C (-40 °F) respectively. The lowest recorded wind chill was of -47.8 °C (-54.0 °F) on January 8, 1968. Freezing rain is also relatively common, even relative to other parts of the country. One such large storm caused power outages and affected the local economy, and came to be known as the 1998 Ice Storm. Summers are fairly warm and humid in Ottawa, although they are moderate in length. The average July maximum temperature is 26 °C (80 °F), with occasional northerly incursions of comfortable, cool air which drop humidity levels, although daytime temperatures of 30 °C (86 °F) or higher are commonplace in most summers. A maximum temperature of 39.5 °C (103 °F) was recorded in the summer of 2005 at certain locations. During periods of hot weather, high humidity is often an aggravating factor, especially close to the rivers. Ottawa annually averages 41, 12 and 2 days with humidex (combined temperature & humidity index) above 30 °C (86 °F), 35 °C (95 °F) and 40 °C (104 °F) respectively. The highest recorded humidex was 48 °C (118 °F) on August 1, 2006. Spring and fall are variable, prone to extremes in temperature and unpredictable swings in conditions. Hot days above 30 °C (86 °F) have occurred as early as March (as in 2002) or as late as October, as well as snow well into May and early in October (although such events are extremely unusual and brief). Average annual precipitation averages around 943 millimetres (37 in.). The biggest one-day rainfall occurred on September 9, 2004 when the remnants of Hurricane Frances dumped nearly 136 mm (5½ inches) of rain in the city. There are about 2,060 hours of average sunshine annually (47% of possible). Destructive summer weather events such as tornadoes, major flash floods, extreme heat waves, severe hail and remnant effects from hurricanes are rare, but all have occurred in the Ottawa area. Some of the most notable tornadoes in the region occurred in 1978 (F2), 1994 (F3), 1999 (F1) and 2002 (F1). On February 24, 2006, an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On January 1, 2000, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale struck Ottawa. On average, a small tremor occurs in Ottawa every three years. Ottawa is served by VIA Rail, a number of airlines that fly into Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, and inter-city bus companies such as Greyhound through the Ottawa Central Bus Station. The capital city of Canada is also served by a network of freeways, the main one being provincial Highway 417 (called The Queensway), Ottawa-Carleton Regional Road 174 (Formerly Provincial Highway 17), and the newly constructed Highway 416 (Veterans' Memorial Highway), connecting Ottawa to the rest of the 400-Series Highway network in Ontario. Highway 417 is also the Ottawa portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. The city also has a few Scenic Parkways (Promenades), such as the Ottawa River Parkway, and has a freeway connection to Autoroute 5 and Autoroute 50, in Hull. For a complete listing of the parkways and roads in Ottawa, see the List of Ottawa roads. The O-Train, Ottawa's light rail train system Ottawa's main mass transit service is OC Transpo (provided by the City of Ottawa). The Ottawa rapid transit system includes the transitway (a network of mostly grade-separated, extremely high-frequency, reserved bus rapid transit lanes with full stations instead of stops) and a light rail system called the O-Train. A new light rail system, including a tunnel under the downtown core, was considered for connecting the north-south and the east-west sections of the city, however the city had cancelled an expansion plan of the north-south line that would have linked Barrhaven to downtown in 2009. A series of 4 new rapid transit proposals have now been tabled to City Council, all of which include a tunnel under the downtown core. The most elaborate proposal includes the conversion of Bus Transitway between Baseline Station in the west, Blair Station in the east and MacDonald-Cartier International Airport in the south being converted to Light Rail, as well as the expansion of the Bus only Transitway out to Kanata in the west, Orleans in the east, Bowesville (Riverside South) and Barrhaven in the south. There are also discussions of having OC Transpo Light Rail and STO Transitway networks linking on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Both OC Transpo and the Quebec-based Société de transport de l'Outaouais (STO) operate bus services between Ottawa and Gatineau. A transfer or bus pass of one is accepted on the other without having to pay a top-up fare on regular routes. The Rideau Canal and pathway at dawn, near Carleton University The Rideau Canal, which starts in Kingston, Ontario, winds its way through the city. The final flight of locks on the canal are between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier. Also, during the winter season the canal is usually open and is a form of transportation downtown for about 7.8 kilometres (4.8 mi) for ice skaters (from a point near Carleton University to the Rideau Centre) and forms the world's largest skating rink. There is a large network of paved multi-use pathways that wind their way through much of the city, including along the Ottawa River, Rideau River, and Rideau Canal. These pathways are used for transportation, tourism, and recreation. Because most streets either have wide curb lanes or bicycle lanes, cycling is a popular mode of transportation in the region throughout the year. Ottawa sits at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The Ottawa and Gatineau rivers were historically important in the logging and lumber industries, and the Rideau as part of the Rideau Canal system connecting the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River with the Ottawa River. , List of Ottawa parks, List of Ottawa roads The Château Laurier in downtown Ottawa. , National Capital Region Ottawa is home to a wealth of national museums, official residences, government buildings, memorials and heritage structures. Federal buildings in the National Capital Region are managed by the Public Works Canada, while most of the federal lands in the Region are managed by the National Capital Commission or NCC; its control of much undeveloped land gives the NCC a great deal of influence over the city's development. In 2006, the National Capital Commission completed work on the long-discussed Confederation Boulevard, a ceremonial route linking key attractions in National Capital Region, on both sides of the Ottawa River, in Ottawa as well as Gatineau, Quebec. Below is a map of the National Capital Region showing the prominent buildings and structures. Click on the stars to read articles on the individual buildings. Ottawa's primary employers are the Canadian federal government and the hi-tech industry. Ottawa has become known as "Silicon Valley North." Ottawa is home to one major league sports team, the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. The Senators' home rink is located at Scotiabank Place. Ottawa hosted the 2009 World Junior Hockey Championships. Ottawa was also home to a AAA minor league baseball team, the Ottawa Lynx of the International League, which was affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies. Until the team's sale (effective November 16, 2006), the team was a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles. Under the terms of the sale, the Lynx left Ottawa following the 2007 season. As of April 2008, the team began playing as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs at newly-constructed Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In Spring 2008, the Ottawa Rapids (who were called the "Rapidz" in their first season) began playing at Ottawa Baseball Stadium as part of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, but as of the Fall of 2008, the Ottawa Rapidz have ceased operations. It is believed that the team has a debt of $1.5 million (CDN).The Can Am baseball league announced that league commissioner Miles Wolff would run the Rapids in Ottawa for 2009. Scotiabank Place, where the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League play. Ottawa had a significant presence in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders football team and an attempted revival with the Ottawa Renegades (established 2002 - suspended operations in 2006, due to financial difficulties and poor fan attendance). Football was played at Frank Clair Stadium. On March 25, 2008, CFL commissionner Mark Cohon awarded a conditional franchise to a group led by 67s owner Jeff Hunt. Ottawa is also home to a semi-professional football team in the Empire Football League, the Ottawa Demon Deacons and 3 Major Junior Football teams in the QJFL, the Ottawa Junior Riders, Ottawa Sooners and the Cumberland Panthers. Ottawa also has a major junior ice hockey team, the Ottawa 67's of the Ontario Hockey League. Ottawa's two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa both have athletic associations; the team names are the Carleton Ravens and the Ottawa Gee-Gees respectively. Ottawa's top soccer team is the Ottawa Fury who play in the women's W-League and the men's USL Premier Development League. Harness and Horse racing can be found at Rideau Carleton Raceway off Albion Road and auto racing can be found at the Capital City Speedway off Highway 7. Ottawa also has a professional women's hockey team, the Ottawa Capital Canucks. The Rideau Canoe Club, located at Hog's Back Park on the Rideau River, produces and supports many national- and international-level paddlers. The city also supports many casual sporting activities, such as skating on the Rideau Canal or curling in winter, cycling and jogging along the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, and Rideau River in summer, playing Ultimate all year round (especially through the O.C.U.A.), skiing and hiking in the Greenbelt and the nearby Gatineau Park, and sailing on Lac Deschenes, part of the Ottawa River or golfing on many of the golf courses in the Ottawa area. During the coldest parts of winter there is ice fishing on the Ottawa river. Ottawa has many cricket clubs for people of all ages. Eastern Ontario's top rugby players are members of the Ottawa Harlequins which competes each summer in the Rugby Canada Super League. The Elgin Street facade of the Heritage Building section of Ottawa City Hall. In addition to being the capital of Canada, Ottawa is politically diverse with regard to local politics. Most of the city traditionally supports the Liberal Party, although only some parts of the city are consistent Liberal strongholds. Perhaps the safest areas for the Liberals are the ones dominated by francophones, especially in Vanier and central Gloucester. Central Ottawa is usually more left-leaning, and the New Democratic Party can win ridings there as government unions and activist groups are fairly strong. Some of Ottawa's suburbs are swing areas, notably central Nepean and, despite its Francophone population, Orléans. The southern and western parts of the old city of Ottawa are generally moderate or slightly left of centre but periodically swing to the Conservative Party. The farther one goes from the city centre into suburban fringes like Kanata and Barrhaven and rural areas, the voters tend to be increasingly conservative, both fiscally and socially. This is especially true in the former Townships of West Carleton, Goulbourn, Rideau and Osgoode, which are more in line with the staunchly conservative areas in the surrounding counties. However not all rural areas support the Conservative Party. Rural parts of the former township of Cumberland, with a large number of Francophones, traditionally support the Liberal Party, though their support has recently weakened. Ottawa became the legislative capital of the Northwest Territories when it reverted to 1870 constitutional status, after Alberta, and Saskatchewan were carved out in 1905. From 1905 to 1951 almost all of the council members were civil servants living in Ottawa. From 1951 to 1967 the territory alternated legislative sessions with various Northwest Territories communities. Ottawa only held legislative sessions of the council. Fort Smith, Northwest Territories became the administrative centre and officially housed the civil service from 1911 to 1967. Map of Ottawa showing the francophone concentrations In 2006 the population of the city of Ottawa was 812,129 /ref>, while the population of the Census Metropolitan Area was 1,130,761 /ref>. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age. Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 22.28 percent of the population /ref> in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and The Balkans . Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 20.2 percent, while those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.5 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted are: Black Canadians: 4.9%, Chinese Canadian: 3.8%, South Asian: 3.3%, and Arab: 3.0%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups /ref>. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 62.6 percent, those who speak both English and French, 0.85 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 14.9 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian and many others. As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number about 13.29 percent. Tabaret Hall at the University of Ottawa. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of engineers, scientists, and residents with PhDs in Canada. *Algonquin College *Carleton University *Dominican University College *La Cité Collégiale *Saint Paul University *University of Ottawa *The National Research Council of Canada's shortwave time signal station, CHU, is located in Ottawa. *The Ottawa ankle rules were developed in, and named after the city. *List of attractions in Ottawa *List of Ottawa cinemas *Beaver Tails * The August Ontario civic holiday, which is called Simcoe Day in Toronto and Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough, is named Colonel By Day in Ottawa. The Rideau Canal serves as a waterway in summer and a skating rink in winter. ;Sister Cities * Beijing, China (1999) * Buenos Aires, Argentina * Catania, Sicily, Italy (2003) * Campobasso, Molise, Italy *Ottawa City Council *Ottawa (City of) defunct electoral district *Ottawa municipal election, 2003 *Ottawa municipal election, 2006 *1900 Hull-Ottawa fire *1929 Ottawa sewer explosion *City of Ottawa (municipal government) *City of Ottawa Act *Dominion Arboretum *List of communities in the Ottawa area *List of Ottawa churches *List of Ottawa mayors *List of Ottawa media outlets *List of people from Ottawa *Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton *List of bridges in Ottawa *List of Ottawa buildings *List of Ottawa schools *List of Ottawa-Gatineau's 10 tallest skyscrapers *List of embassies and high commissions in Ottawa *List of designated heritage properties in Ottawa *List of crossings of the Ottawa River * Statistics Canada 2001 Census of Canada, retrieved October 10, 2006. * * City of Ottawa's website * National Capital Freenet - Directory of Ottawa and Environs * Musée Bytown Museum * Interesting Facts About Ottawa from Canadian Geographic * Parliament Hill Webcam * Ontario Photos, Ottawa
Otter
Does the giant otter live in South America?
Yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Does the giant otter live in South America?
yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters have claws?
Yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters have claws?
yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters eat fish?
Yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters eat fish?
yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
What is an otter's den called?
A holt
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
What is an otter's den called?
holt
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Where do sea otters live?
Beside water
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Where do sea otters live?
Pacific coast of North America
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Why are otters vulnerable to prey depletion?
Prey-dependence
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Why are otters vulnerable to prey depletion?
prey-dependency
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters enjoy playing?
Yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do otters enjoy playing?
yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do sea otters have a layer of fat like whales?
No
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Do sea otters have a layer of fat like whales?
no
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Is the otter in the same family as the badger?
Yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Otter
Is the otter in the same family as the badger?
yes
data/set1/a7
Otter Otters are semi-aquatic (or in one case aquatic) fish-eating mammals. The otter subfamily Lutrinae forms part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers, as well as others. With thirteen species in seven genera, otters have an almost worldwide distribution. They mainly eat aquatic animals, predominantly fish and shellfish, but also other invertebrates, amphibians, birds and small mammals. The word otter derives from the Old English word otr, otor or oter. This and cognate words in other Indo-European languages ultimately stem from a root which also gave rise to the English words water, wet and winter. An otter's den is called a holt. Male otters are dog-otters, females are bitches and babies are cubs or pups. The collective noun for otters is pack or sometimes romp, being descriptive of their often playful nature. Otters have long, slim bodies and relatively short limbs, with webbed paws. Most have sharp claws on their feet, and all except the sea otter have long muscular tails. They have a very soft underfur which is protected by their outer layer of long guard hair. This traps a layer of air, and keeps them dry and warm under water. Otters do not depend on their specialized fur alone for survival in the cold waters where many live: they also have very high metabolic rates. For example Eurasian otters must eat 15% of their body-weight a day, and sea otters 20 to 25%, depending on the temperature. In water as warm as 10°C (50°F) an otter needs to catch 100 grams (3 oz) of fish per hour to survive. Most species hunt for 3 to 5 hours a day, and nursing mothers up to 8 hours a day. For most otters, fish is the primary staple of their diet. This is often supplemented by frogs, crayfish and crabs. Some otters are expert at opening shellfish, and others will feed on available small mammals or birds. Prey-dependence leaves otters very vulnerable to prey depletion. Otters are very active, chasing prey in the water or searching the beds of rivers, lakes or the sea. Most species live beside water, entering it mainly to hunt or travel, otherwise spending much of their time on land to avoid their fur becoming waterlogged. The sea otter does live in the sea for most of its life. Otters are playful animals. For example, they are often seen sliding repeatedly down snowy slopes, apparently for sheer enjoyment. Different species vary in their social structure, with some being largely solitary, while others live in groups in a few species these groups may be fairly large. Cladogram, after Koepfli et al 2008 and Bininda-Emonds et al 1999 Genus Lutra *Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) *Hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) Genus Hydrictis *Spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) Genus Lutrogale *Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) Genus Lontra *Northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) *Southern river otter (Lontra provocax) *Neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) *Marine otter (Lontra felina) Genus Pteronura *Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) Genus Aonyx *African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis) *Congo clawless otter (Aonyx congicus) *Oriental small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) Genus Enhydra *Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) The northern river otter (Lontra canadensis) became one of the major animals hunted and trapped for fur in North America after European contact. River otters eat a variety of fish and shellfish, as well as small land mammals and birds. They grow to one metre (3 to 4 ft) in length and weigh from five to fifteen kilograms (10 to 30 lb). In some areas this is a protected species, and some places have otter sanctuaries, which help sick and injured otters to recover. A sea otter in Morro Bay, California Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) live along the Pacific coast of North America. Their historic range included shallow waters of the Bering Strait and Kamchatka, and as far south as Japan. Sea otters have some 200 thousand strands of hair per square centimetre of skin, a rich fur for which humans hunted them almost to extinction. By the time the 1911 Fur Seal Treaty gave them protection, so few sea otters remained that the fur trade had become unprofitable. Sea otters eat shellfish and other invertebrates (especially clams, abalone, and sea urchins), frequently using rocks as crude tools to smash open shells. They grow to 1.0 to 1.5 metres (2.5 to 5 ft) in length and weigh 30 kilograms (65 lb). Although once near extinction, they have begun to spread again, from remnant populations in California and Alaska. Unlike most marine mammals (such as seals or whales), sea otters do not have a layer of insulating blubber. As with other species of otter, they rely on a layer of air trapped in their fur, which they keep topped up by blowing into the fur from their mouths. They spend most of their time in the water, whereas other otters spend much of their time on land. Eurasian otter, in England This species (Lutra lutra) inhabits Europe, and its range also extends across most of Asia and parts of North Africa. In the British Isles they occurred commonly as recently as the 1950s, but became rare in many areas due to the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and as a result of habitat-loss and water pollution (they remained relatively common in parts of Scotland and Ireland). Population levels attained a low point in the 1980s, but are now recovering strongly. The UK Biodiversity Action Plan envisages the re-establishment of otters by 2010 in all the UK rivers and coastal areas that they inhabited in 1960. Roadkill deaths have become one of the significant threats to the success of their re-establishment. Giant otter The giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) inhabits South America, especially the Amazon river basin, but is becoming increasingly rare due to poaching, habitat loss, and the use of mercury and other toxins in illegal alluvial gold mining. This gregarious animal grows to a length of up to 1.8 metres (6 ft), and is more aquatic than most other otters. * Otters in popular culture Image:Amblonyx_cinereus.jpg| Oriental small-clawed otter Image:Lutra_longicaudis.jpg|Long-tailed otter in Tortuguero, Costa Rica Image:Otters.jpg|otters at the Perth Zoo, Western Australia Image:Fischotter, Lutra Lutra.JPG|Eurasian otter Image:OtterinHolt.JPG|Eurasian otter in holt Image:Pair of Otters.jpg *Gallant, D., L. Vasseur, & C.H. Bérubé (2007). Unveiling the limitations of scat surveys to monitor social species: a case study on river otters. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:258–265. * ARKive Photographs and Videos of Eurasian Otter. On the same site are photos and videos of Marine otter (Lontra felina), Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Marine otter (Lontra felina) , Sea otter (Enhydra lutris), Smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) and the Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). * The Otter Trust * International Otter Survival Fund * Otternet * North American River Otter
Santiago
Are there any cities named Santiago in the United States?
yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Are there any cities named Santiago in the United States?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Was Santiago the name of an indie/punk band?
yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Was Santiago the name of an indie/punk band?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Is Santiago a name in Spanish?
yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Is Santiago a name in Spanish?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What is the origin of the name Santiago?
Spanish for St. James
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What is the origin of the name Santiago?
sanit + iago, James
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Who has released an album or song named Santiago?
The Chieftains; Loreena McKennitt
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Who has released an album or song named Santiago?
The Chieftains and Loreena McKennitt
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What is the Order of Santiago?
a Spanish knightly order
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What is the Order of Santiago?
a Spanish Knightly order
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What notable people have been named Santiago?
Benito Santiago, Hugo Santiago, Joey Santiago, Liliana Santiago, Rafael Santiago Maria, Santiago Caballero, Santiago Cabrera; James, son of Zebedee
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What notable people have been named Santiago?
Benito, Hugo, and others
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What fictional stories include a main character named Santiago?
Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Covert Operations Essentials, Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the television series Babylon 5, Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire, aulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel), the television show Friday Night Lights
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What fictional stories include a main character named Santiago?
Interview with the Vampire, The Alchemist, and others
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Is Santiago the national capital of a country?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Is santiago Spanish for St. James ( from santo , saint + iago , James )?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
Is santiago Spanish for St. James?
Yes
data/set3/a6
Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Santiago
What is Santiago?
Santiago is Spanish for St. James. It is also the name of places in Argentina, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, the United States, Venezuela, and the Amazon. It is also the name of a baseball catcher, a film director, a guitarist, an economist, a footballer, a DJ, an actor, and James, son of Zebedee. Fictional people with this name include a character from Gears of War, a character from Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a character in Old Man and the Sea, a character in Babylon 5, a character in Interview with the Vampire, the main character of The Alchemist, and a character on Friday Night Lights. There has also been a battle of Santiago de Cuba, a couple of bands named Santiago, an Order of Santiago, and "Santiago" as a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry.
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Santiago Santiago is Spanish for St. James (from santo, saint + iago, James). It is the name of: In Argentina: *Santiago del Estero Province **Santiago del Estero, capital of the province In Brazil: *Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul In Cape Verde: *Santiago, Cape Verde In Chile: *Santiago, Chile, the capital *Santiago (commune) *Santiago Province, Chile *Santiago Metropolitan Region In Colombia: *Santiago de Cali *Santiago, Norte de Santander *Santiago, Putumayo In Costa Rica: *Santiago de Palmares *Santiago de Paraíso *Santiago de Puriscal *Santiago de San Rafael *Santiago de San Ramón In Cuba: *Santiago de Cuba Province **Santiago de Cuba, capital of the province In Dominican Republic: *Santiago Province (Dominican Republic) **Santiago de los Caballeros, capital of the province In Ecuador: *Guayaquil, officially called Santiago de Guayaquil *Santiago Island (Galápagos) In Guatemala: *Santiago Sacatepéquez In Jamaica: * Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago * Spanish Town, Jamaica, formerly known as Santiago de la Vega In Mexico: *Querétaro, Querétaro, formerly called Santiago de Querétaro *Santiago, Nuevo León *Santiago, Baja California Sur *Santiago Maravatío (Guanajuato) *Santiago Tianguistenco, a city in the State of México *Santiago Jamiltepec (Oaxaca) In Nicaragua: *León, Nicaragua, originally called Santiago de los Caballeros de León In Panama: *Santiago de Veraguas, Veraguas In Paraguay: *Santiago, Paraguay, town and district in Misiones Department In Peru: *Santiago de Surco, a district of Lima *Santiago de Chuco, a province of the La Libertad region *Santiago River (Peru) In the Philippines: *Santiago, Agusan del Norte *Santiago, General Trias, Cavite *Santiago, Ilocos Sur *Santiago City, Isabela province *Santiago Island (Philippines), Pangasinan province In Portugal: *Santiago (Alcácer do Sal), a parish in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal *Santiago (Arganil), a parish in the municipality of Arganil *Santiago (Armamar), a parish in the municipality of Armamar *Santiago (Lisbon), a parish in the municipality of Lisbon *Santiago (Seia), a parish in the municipality of Seia *Santiago (Sesimbra), a parish in the municipality of Sesimbra *Santiago (Tavira), a parish in the municipality of Tavira *Santiago (Torres Novas), a parish in the municipality of Torres Novas *Santiago da Guarda, a parish in the municipality of Ansião *Santiago da Ribeira de Alhariz, a parish in the municipality of Valpaços *Santiago de Besteiros, a parish in the municipality of Tondela *Santiago de Bougado, a parish in the municipality of Trofa *Santiago de Candoso, a parish in the municipality of Guimarães *Santiago do Cacém, a parish and a municipality in the Setúbal *Santiago de Carreiras, a parish in the municipality of Vila Verde *Santiago de Cassurrães, a parish in the municipality of Mangualde *Santiago de Figueiró, a parish in the municipality of Amarante *Santiago de Litém, a parish in the municipality of Pombal *Santiago de Montalegre, a parish in the municipality of Sardoal *Santiago de Piães, a parish in the municipality of Cinfães *Santiago de Riba-Ul, a parish in the municipality of Oliveira de Azeméis *Santiago de Subarrifana, a parish in the municipality of Penafiel *Santiago de Vila Chã, a parish in the municipality of Ponte da Barca *Santiago do Escoural, a parish in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo *Santiago dos Velhos, a parish in the municipality of Arruda dos Vinhos *São Pedro e Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Torres Vedras *Santiago Maior (Alandroal), a parish in the municipality of Alandroal *Santiago Maior (Beja), a parish in the municipality of Beja *Santiago Maior (Castelo de Vide), a parish in the municipality of Castelo de Vide *Vale de Santiago, a parish in the municipality of Odemira In Spain: *Santiago de Compostela, Galicia *Santiago (Valdés), a parish in the municipality of Valdés *Santiago (Sariego), a parish in the municipality of Sariego *Santiago de la Ribera, a cluster of San Javier in Murcia *Santiago (comarca), a comarca in the province of A Coruña *Santiago del Teide, Canary Islands In the United States: * Santiago High School, Garden Grove, California * Santiago, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County * Santiago Peak, a mountain in Orange County, California In Uruguay: *Montevideo, originally called San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo In Venezuela: *Caracas, originally called Santiago de León de Caracas In geography: * Santiago River, a tributary of the Amazon River Santiago is the name of: * Benito Santiago, a professional baseball catcher * Hugo Santiago, film director * Joey Santiago, guitarist of the Pixies and The Martinis * Liliana Santiago, American Economist * Rafael Santiago Maria, a Brazilian footballer known simply as Santiago * Santiago Caballero, DJ and Producer * Santiago Cabrera, an actor * James, son of Zebedee, also called Saint James the Greater Fictional people: * Dominic Santiago, a fictional character from Gears of War * Santiago Arnavisca, a fictional character from * Santiago, the name of a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez * Santiago, the titular character of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea * Luis Santiago, a fictional character in the television series Babylon 5 * Santiago (The Vampire Chronicles), character in Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire * Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (novel) * Santiago, a character on the television show Friday Night Lights In history: * Battle of Santiago de Cuba In music: * Santiago (band), an indie/punk band from Santa Rosa, California, USA * Santiago, a 1996 album by The Chieftains * "Santiago", the title of one of Loreena McKennitt's songs from her album The Mask and Mirror Santiago may also refer to: * Order of Santiago, a Spanish Knightly order * Santiago (name), about the common Spanish given name * , by Mike Resnick * "Santiago", a shortened form of the Reconquista battle cry "Santiago y cierra España" * Santiago Maior * San Diego (disambiguation)
Spanish_language
Are countries without in red?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
However, is English the official language?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Are most Spanish speakers in Latin America?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Did the language lose its official status?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Where do about 400 million people speak Spanish?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
What kind of instrument is the spanish language?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is the lexical similarity with Italian estimated at 82%?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is spanish an official language of the European Union?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
What is an official language of the European Union?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is it true that mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is this phenomenon notable in Brazil?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is spanish one of the official languages?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is universidad de México Instituto Cervantes Spanish language of Spain?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Is spanish language of the European Union?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.
Spanish_language
Pasan en consecuencia , las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras , o que las contienen , a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l , respectivamente ?
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Spanish_language Spanish ( ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, about 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, making it the world's second or third most spoken language, depending on the sources. Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is growing increasingly popular as a second or third language in a number of countries due to logistical, economic, and touristic interest towards the many nations which chiefly use Spanish as the primary language. This phenomenon is most notable in Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and much of the Anglosphere in general. Spaniards tend to call this language (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages such as French and English, but call it (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows: However, to some in other linguistic regions, this is considered as demeaning to them and they will therefore use the term castellano exclusively. The name Castellano (Castilian), which refers directly to the origins of the Language and the sociopolitical context in which it was introduced in the Americas, is preferred in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Chile, instead of , which is more commonly used to refer to the language as a whole in the rest of Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Spanish is one of the official languages of the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, the Latin Union, the Caricom, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Antarctic Treaty. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 350 million, likely making it the third most spoken language by total number of speakers (after English and Chinese). Universidad de México Instituto Cervantes ( "El Mundo" news) Today, Spanish is an official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and Equatorial Guinea; 20 nations speak it as their primary language. Spanish also is one of six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the United States CIA The World Factbook United States and the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. , Statistical Abstract of the United States: page 47: Table 47: Languages Spoken at Home by Language: 2003 , MLA Fall 2002. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Spanish is an official language of Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken in Gibraltar, though English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Gibraltar Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language. It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. BBC Education Languages, Languages Across Europe Spanish. Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain and Equatorial Guinea are outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native speakers of any country. Nationally, Spanish is the —de facto or de jure— official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico , Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay (co-official Guaraní Ethnologue – Paraguay(2000). Guaraní is also the most-spoken language in Paraguay by its native speakers. ), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official with English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Spanish has no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize; however, per the 2000 census, it is spoken by 43% of the population. Belize Population and Housing Census 2000 Mainly, it is spoken by Hispanic descendants who remained in the region since the 17th century; however, English is the official language. CIA World Factbook Belize Spain colonized Trinidad and Tobago first in 1498, leaving the Carib people the Spanish language. Also the Cocoa Panyols, laborers from Venezuela, took their culture and language with them; they are accredited with the music of "Parang" ("Parranda") on the island. Because of Trinidad's location on the South American coast, the country is much influenced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors. A recent census shows that more than 1,500 inhabitants speak Spanish. In 2004, the government launched the Spanish as a First Foreign Language (SAFFL) initiative in March 2005. The Secretariat for The Implementation of Spanish, Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Government regulations require Spanish to be taught, beginning in primary school, while thirty percent of public employees are to be linguistically competent within five years. The government also announced that Spanish will be the country's second official language by 2020, beside English. Spanish is important in Brazil because of its proximity to and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbors; for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc. Mercosul, Portal Oficial (Portuguese) In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, making Spanish language teaching mandatory in both public and private secondary schools. In many border towns and villages (especially on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border), a mixed language known as Portuñol is spoken. In the 2006 census, 44.3 million people of the U.S. population were Hispanic or Latino by origin; U.S. Census Bureau Hispanic or Latino by specific origin. 34 million people, 12.2 percent, of the population older than 5 years old speak Spanish at home. U.S. Census Bureau 1. Percent of People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006, U.S. Census Bureau 2. 34,044,945 People 5 Years and Over Who Speak Spanish at Home: 2006 Spanish has a long history in the United States (many south-western states and Florida were part of Mexico and Spain), and it recently has been revitalized by Hispanic immigrants. Spanish is the most widely taught foreign language in the country. , MLA Fall 2002. Although the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level in various states besides English; in the U.S. state of New Mexico for instance, 30% of the population speaks the language. It also has strong influence in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio, New York City, and in the 2000s the language has rapidly expanded in Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and other major Sun-Belt cities. Spanish is the dominant spoken language in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. In total, the U.S. has the world's fifth-largest Spanish-speaking population. Facts, Figures, and Statistics About Spanish, American Demographics, 1998. In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea (co-official French and Portuguese), as well as an official language of the African Union. Today, in Western Sahara, nearly 200,000 refugee Sahrawis are able to read and write in Spanish, El refuerzo del español llega a los saharauis con una escuela en los campos de Tinduf and several thousands have received university education in foreign countries as part of aid packages (mainly Cuba and Spain). In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is the predominant language when counting native and non-native speakers (around 500,000 people), while Fang is the most spoken language by a number of native speakers. Ethnologue – Equatorial Guinea ((2000) CIA World Factbook – Equatorial Guinea (Last updated 20 September 2007) It is also spoken in the Spanish cities in continental North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla) and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands (143,000 and 1,995,833 people, respectively). Within Northern Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish. Morocco.com, The Languages of Morocco. It is spoken by some communities of Angola, because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War, and in Nigeria by the descendants of Afro-Cuban ex-slaves. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines since the early days of Spanish colonization in the 16th century, until the change of Constitution in 1973. During most of the colonial period it was the language of government, trade and education, and spoken mainly by Spaniards living in the islands and educated Filipinos. However, by the mid 19th century a free public school system in Spanish was established throughout the islands, which increased the numbers of Spanish speakers rapidly. Following the U.S. occupation and administration of the islands, the importance of Spanish fell, especially after the 1920s. The US authorities' imposition of English as the medium of instruction in schools and universities coupled with the prohibition of Spanish in media and educational institutions gradually reduced the importance of the language. After the country became independent in 1946, Spanish remained an official language along with English and Tagalog-based Filipino. However, the language lost its official status in 1973 during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. Under the Corazon Aquino administration which took office in 1986, the mandatory teaching of Spanish in colleges and universities was also stopped, and thus, younger generations of Filipinos have little or no knowledge of Spanish as compared to the older generations. However, the Spanish language retains a large influence in local languages, with many words coming from or being derived from Spanish. (See Article XV, Section 3(3) Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney , where the older Mexican, Colombian, Spanish, and Chilean populations and newer Argentine, Salvadoran and Uruguayan communities live. The U.S. Territories of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, and the independent associated U.S. Territory of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages and spoken by Hispanic American resident populations. There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In some countries in Hispanophone America, it is preferable to use the word castellano to distinguish their version of the language from that of Spain , thus asserting their autonomy and national identity. In Spain, the Castilian dialect's pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means, "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written," an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech. . The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers. Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: , , and . The use of the pronoun and/or its verb forms is called . Countries that feature , in blue. The deeper the blue is, the more predominant is. Countries where is a regionalism are in green; countries without are in red. is the subject form [you say] and the term of preposition (a vos digo) [to you I say], while "os" is the form of the direct complement [I saw you (all)] and of the indirect complement without the preposition [I say to you (all)]. Real Academia Española The verb always goes in the second-person plural even though we addressed only one speaker: . Like the possessive employs the form : . The adjectives referred to the person or people to whom we address have established the correspondent agreement in gender and number: . The more commonly known American dialectal form of voseo uses the pronominal or verbal forms of the second-person plural (or derivatives of these) to address only one speaker. This is appropriate to distinct regional or social varieties of American Spanish and on the contrary the reverential , which implies closeness and familiarity. The employs the use of as a pronoun to replace and , which are second-person singular informal. * As a subject employs: instead of * As a vocative: instead of * As a term of preposition: instead of * And as a term of comparison: instead of However, for the (that which uses the pronominal verbs and its complements without preposition) and for the possessive, they employ the forms of , respectively: In other words, in the previous examples the authors conjugate the pronoun subject with the pronominal verbs and its complements of . The verbal consists of the use of the second person plural, more or less modified, for the conjugated forms of the second person singular: . The verbal paradigm of is characterized by its complexity. On the one hand, it affects, to a distinct extent, each verbal tense. On the other hand, it varies in functions of geographic and social factors and not all the forms are accepted in cultured norms. is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun, although with wide differences in social consideration. Generally, it can be said that there are zones of exclusive use of in the following areas: almost all of Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, the majority of Peru and Venezuela, and; the Atlantic cost of Colombia. They alternate as a cultured form and as a popular or rural form in: Bolivia, north and south of Peru, Ecuador, small zones of the Venezuelan Andes, a great part of Colombia, and the oriental border of Cuba. exists as an intermediate formality of treatment and as a familiar treatment in: Chile, the Venezuelan state of Zulia, the Pacific coast of Colombia, Central America, and; the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Areas of generalized include Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms (formal) and (familiar). The pronoun is the plural form of in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with . It is notable that the use of for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun–verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", , uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as , using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun–verb agreement is preserved in most cases. Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means "stingy". Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" (among other meanings) in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as a Mexican dish. Pija in many countries of Latin America and Spain itself is an obscene slang word for "penis", while in Spain the word also signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means "car" in Spain, for the vast majority of Spanish-speakers actually means "baby-stroller", in Guatemala it means "pig", while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others, as well as in Spain. Papaya is the slang term in Cuba for "vagina" therefore in Cuba when referring to the actual fruit Cubans call it fruta bomba instead. 3 Guys From Miami: Fruta Bomba Urban Dictionary: papaya Also, just how Americans use the term "dude" to refer to a friend or someone, Spanish also has its own slang, or "modismo", but varies in every country. For example, "dude" is "güey, mano, cuate or carnal" in Mexico, "mae" in Costa Rica, "tío" in Spain, "parce","parcero in Colombia, "hueón" in Chile, "chabón" in Argentina, "pata", "causa" in Peru; "pana" in Venezuela and Ecuador. The (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media. Spanish is closely related to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian, Galician, Ladino, Leonese and Portuguese. Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighboring Occitan language than to Spanish, or indeed than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%. See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese for further information. Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is essentially medieval Spanish and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. Ladino speakers are currently almost exclusively Sephardi Jews, with family roots in Turkey, Greece or the Balkans: current speakers mostly live in Israel and Turkey, with a few pockets in Latin America. It lacks the Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Spanish. It contains, however, other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew, some French, Greek and Turkish, and other languages spoken where the Sephardim settled. Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel) who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardi communities, especially in music. In the case of the Latin American communities, the danger of extinction is also due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian. A related dialect is Haketia, the Judaeo-Spanish of northern Morocco. This too tended to assimilate with modern Spanish, during the Spanish occupation of the region. Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%. As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. The lexical similarity with Portuguese is greater, 89%, but the vagaries of Portuguese pronunciation make it less easily understood by Hispanophones than Italian is. Mutual intelligibility between Spanish and French or Romanian is even lower (lexical similarity being respectively 75% and 71% ): comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is as low as an estimated 45% – the same as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would. 1. also in early modern Portuguese (e.g. The Lusiads) 2. in Southern Italian dialects and languages 3. Alternatively A page of , in medieval Castilian. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Arabic in vocabulary during the Andalusian period and other surviving influences from Basque and Celtiberian, as well as Germanic languages via the Visigoths. Spanish developed along the remote cross road strips among the Alava, Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain (see Glosas Emilianenses), as a strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese, with a higher degree of Basque influence in these regions (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin , Spanish ), palatalization (Latin , Spanish , and Latin , Spanish ) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin , Spanish ; Latin , Spanish ). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well. During the , this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and remains a minority language in the northern coastal Morocco. The first Latin-to-Spanish grammar ( ) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492, by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When it was presented to Isabel de Castilla, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?", to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." From the 16th century onwards, the language was taken to the Americas and the Spanish East Indies via Spanish colonization. In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced to Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, and in areas of the United States that had not been part of the Spanish Empire, such as in Spanish Harlem, in New York City. For details on borrowed words and other external influences upon Spanish, see Influences on the Spanish language. A defining feature of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes are found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish, they were significant. Some examples: * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "stone". * Lat. > Sp. , It. , Fr. / , Rom. , Port./Gal. , Cat. "die". Peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel that did not diphthongate. Compare for instance: * Lat. > It. , Port. , Gal. , Fr. , Cat. , Occitan (but Gascon ) Sp. (but Ladino ); * Lat. > Lad. , Port./Gal. , Sp. ; * but Lat. > It. , Port./Gal. , Cat. , Sp./Lad. . Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example: * Lat. , acc. , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , . However, in Spanish there are also the forms , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . * Lat. acc. , , > Lad. , , ; Sp. , , ; Port. , , ; Gal. , , . Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe, representing the phoneme , a letter distinct from n, although typographically composed of an n with a tilde) and the digraphs ch ( , representing the phoneme ) and ll ( , representing the phoneme ). However, the digraph rr ( , "strong r", , "double r", or simply ), which also represents a distinct phoneme , is not similarly regarded as a single letter. Since 1994, the digraphs ch and ll are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes, though they remain a part of the alphabet. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 1st ed.: "[...] en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, las palabras que comienzan por estas dos letras, o que las contienen, pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la c y de la l, respectivamente. Esta reforma afecta únicamente al proceso de ordenación alfabética de las palabras, no a la composición del abecedario, del que los dígrafos ch y ll siguen formando parte." "No obstante, en el X Congreso de la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, celebrado en 1994, se acordó adoptar para los diccionarios académicos, a petición de varios organismos internacionales, el orden alfabético latino universal, en el que la ch y la ll no se consideran letras independientes. En consecuencia, estas dos letras pasan a alfabetizarse en los lugares que les corresponden dentro de la C (entre -cg- y -ci-) y dentro de la L (entre -lk- y -lm-), respectivamente." Real Academia Española, Explanation at (in Spanish and English) Thus, the Spanish alphabet has the following 29 letters: :a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Toponymy of Mexico), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel. The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare ("the", masculine singular definite article) with ("he" or "it"), or ("you", object pronoun), (preposition "of" or "from"), and (reflexive pronoun) with ("tea"), ("give") and ("I know", or imperative "be"). The interrogative pronouns ( , , , , etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives ( , , , etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., should be read as rather than ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this. When u is written between g and a front vowel (e or i), if it should be pronounced, it is written with a diaeresis (ü) to indicate that it is not silent as it normally would be (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced ; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced . Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation ( ¡ ) marks. The phonemic inventory listed in the following table includes phonemes that are preserved only in some dialects, other dialects having merged them (such as yeísmo); these are marked with an asterisk (*). Sounds in parentheses are allophones. Where symbols appear in pairs, the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant. By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan: * Initial , when it had evolved into a vacillating , was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated). * The bilabial approximant (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial occlusive (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting emphatic pronunciations that cannot be considered standard or natural. * The voiced alveolar fricative which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart . The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s. * The voiced postalveolar fricative merged with its voiceless counterpart , which evolved into the modern velar sound by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to or . * The voiced alveolar affricate merged with its voiceless counterpart , which then developed into the interdental , now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with as well. See Ceceo, for further information. The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so each syllable has the same duration regardless of stress. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last. The tendencies of stress assignment are as follows: * In words ending in vowels and , stress most often falls on the penultimate syllable. * In words ending in all other consonants, the stress more often falls on the last syllable. * Preantepenultimate stress occurs rarely and only in words like guardándoselos ('saving them for him/her') where a clitic follows certain verbal forms. In addition to the many exceptions to these tendencies, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'). An amusing example of the significance of intonation in Spanish is the phrase ("What do you mean how do I eat? I eat the way I eat!"). Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.) It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually, though not always, places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed. 1 Phonemic representation of the abstract phonological entities (phonemes), 2 phonetic representation of the actual sounds pronounced (phones). In both cases, when several representations are given, the first one corresponds to the dialect in the recording (Castilian with yeísmo) and the rest to several other dialects not in the recording. 3 Capital and (non-standard IPA) are used here to represent the nasal and rhotic archiphonemes that neutralize the phonemic oppositions and , respectively, in syllable coda and intra-cluster positions. * Chavacano language * Countries where Spanish is an official language * Differences between Spanish and Portuguese * Frespañol * Hispanic culture * Hispanophone * Instituto Cervantes * Latin Union * List of English words of Spanish origin * List of Spanish words of Germanic origin * Llanito * Names given to the Spanish language * Palenquero * Papiamento * Portuñol * Real Academia Española * Romance languages * Spanglish * Spanish-based creole languages * Spanish-English translation problems * Spanish language poets * Spanish profanity * Spanish proverbs Peninsular Spanish * Andalusian Spanish * Canarian Spanish * Castilian Spanish * Castrapo (Galician Spanish) * Murcian Spanish Latin American Spanish * Bolivian Spanish * Caliche * Central American Spanish * Chilean Spanish * Colombian Spanish * Cuban Spanish * Dominican Spanish * Mexican Spanish * New Mexican Spanish * Panamanian Spanish * Peruvian Coast Spanish * Puerto Rican Spanish * Rioplatense Spanish * Spanish in the Philippines * Spanish in the United States * Venezuelan Spanish * Dictionary of the RAE Real Academia Española's official Spanish language dictionary * Spanish – BBC Languages * English - Spanish - altogether 260348 entries. * Spanish evolution from Latin * Spanish phrasebook on WikiTravel * The Project Gutenberg EBook of A First Spanish Reader by Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy.